Men use thought only to justify their injustices, and speech only to conceal their thoughts.

— Voltaire, Dialogue XIV, Le Chapon et la Poularde

Voltaire’s wit often illuminates truth. Consider this revealing “thought” as expressed recently in Alert, the voice of AIPAC, to its membership:

Some Americans believe if the Israelis strike Iran, the U.S. will pay the political costs anyway, so it would be better for the Americans to do the job and do it properly. Their clock is a bit different from the one the Israelis hear. Because of their vastly superior firepower, the Americans could strike Iran later, more devastatingly and more sustainably.

How just is it for AIPAC’s mouthpiece to declare that America should “devastate” Iran because it has “vastly more firepower” than Israel and could “do a better job” and “do it properly,” as though this were a clean-up “job” of a waste dump and not an illegal invasion of a member country of the United Nations that has done nothing under international law to threaten the U.S. much less attack it, while the Israeli government and its IDF look on happily content that it is American boys and girls suffering the consequences of the unwarranted attacks and not Jewish boys and girls? Has it come to this, that unnamed Israeli spokespeople, voicing AIPAC’s policies, determine what nation the U.S. should invade without consultation with the representatives of the American people?

Not that this sentiment has not been expressed before. Netanyahu told Piers Morgan the same thing in an interview last year, as I have quoted in previous articles, noting Israel’s Zionist government’s desire to use America’s military as their own claiming that what is good for Israel is good for America. That protestation completes the wit contained in Voltaire’s quote: because Israel is America’s only friend in the mid-east, and the only Democracy, and the only nation in that part of the world aligned with the west, it alone deserves America’s “unquestionable” and “unbreakable” support.

Speech that conceals fails to mention that being Israel’s “only friend” has made the U.S. a pariah among nations in the world and made its touted “Democratic freedoms” a laughing stock as the other nations in the UN watch America “support” the Zionists’ agenda to attack Iraq and Lebanon and Gaza, abort international law as it, like Israel, commits extrajudicial executions in foreign states, equips Israel when it invades its neighbors to the north and attacks peace activists aboard vessels from peaceful nations including Turkey, and, ironically sits silently by as Israel dismantles what little of a democracy existed in that nation by creating new laws that deny full citizenship to anyone not a Jew. Thus have we become a nation supportive of a militaristic Theocracy while we continue to mouth the principle of separation of church and state, a principle founded on tolerance, concealing the truth that there are more than 20 great religions with well over a billion people who accept no religion (Adherents.com) all of whom deserve recognition and, as necessary, support from America.

Clearly Israel’s needs are not America’s needs if we mean by that more war in the mid-east. Have we pulled our troops from Iraq just to move them into Iran? Does any sensible person believe that the Iranians have a “need” or desire to attack the people of the United States? Our forces completely surround Iran. We are the nation with atomic weaponry, not Iran. What possible good would Iran achieve by having a nuclear weapon? Hasn’t Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement while Israel, who damns Iran for its nuclear “ambitions,” has an arsenal of nuclear bombs and has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement. Which of these nations is to be feared? Iran has never attacked a neighbor; Israel attacks and occupies its neighbors at will.

Have the Iranians reason to fear control of the U.S. military by Israeli operatives using this nation as its power because Israel wants to devastate Iran the way Iraq has been devastated? Yes. Israel’s ultimate goal is control of the mid-east by surgically cutting it into small indefensible sections that can be dominated by Israeli money and American forces. It would appear, however, that Israel fears America does not desire to follow Israel’s advice to “take out” Iran the way they convinced the Bush administration to “take out” Saddam Hussein. Hence the constant barrage that characterizes Iran as a warlike state set on wiping Israel off the map and becoming the dominant power in the mid-east.

It’s time, I believe, for the U.S. and the UN to consider how to avoid yet more devastation in the mid-east, not by expanding military operations there but by seeking peace through negotiations and cooperative support for the people of the mid-east. Both Israel and the United States must confront the reality on the ground today that they no longer have control over the people of the mid-east, and recognize the colonial drives that Zionism had designed for Israel are no longer tenable.

While Israeli control of America in the form of Las Vegas billionaires buying the presidency continues in the United States, and Republican candidates crawl to the altar of Mammon to remove Obama, who has already sold his soul to the forces of Evil, the people of the world look on in disbelief, having witnessed for over sixty years the dominance of Zionist deceit, treachery, and manipulation of America as it savaged the mid-east in the name of friendship, democracy and shared values. But now, they have moved to take control of their own lives as they watch Israel corrode from within as it metamorphoses into a tribalistic, superstitious people further isolating themselves from the community of nations.

Can they not see that the people in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and, arguably, in Yemen and Saudi Arabia have had enough of dictators imposed by the U.S. and Israel to control their governments?  Can they not see that Turkey broke with the Zionist forces that demanded compliance with their rule regardless of international law and due respect for neighboring nations? Are they blind to the Jordanian efforts to take seriously their role as a Palestinian neighbor? Do they not see that the people of Egypt have made possible the opening of Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza, that the people of the world have given notice that they will not cease to break that siege with boats entering Gaza through international waters; that the Iraqi people have made clear they will not cave in to America’s continued control of their country by proxy power; that the peoples of Britain, the United States, Canada, and Australia have openly condemned Israel’s injustices to the Palestinian people regardless of their governments paid presidents and prime ministers that claim otherwise?

Have they stood by blind to the French Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee issuing its recent report condemning Israel’s apartheid practices against Palestinians in the West Bank, blind to Secretary Ban’s clear call to Israel that it must withdraw from the occupied territories, blind to the European Union as it issued its recent report critical of the Israeli government’s on-going occupation and settlement of Palestinian land? Blind as Russia, China, Iran and numerous other mid-east nations put into practice what they have agreed upon by resorting to  currencies other than the dollar to be the international means of finance; unable to see that once the people of the world have had an opportunity to view the critically acclaimed, dramatically powerful, passionately presented film, The Promise, by director Peter Kosminsky of the United Kingdom, where the inhumane policies of the Zionist criminals erupts in all its unguarded ferocity, the veil of respectability will be removed from Israelis’ atrocities for all?  And blind, totally blind, to the United Nations as it acts upon a resolution to recognize the rights of the Palestinian people to a state of their own? Must they not see, both Israel and its people, as well as all Americans, that they must accept the reality that no single nation can force its will on all other nations with impunity? That time is over.

Clearly Israel’s militaristic approach to neighborliness does not work. Israel fears “delegitimization”.  It fears boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS), and it fears total isolation from the world’s communities. Should the U.S. become financially incapacitated through the devaluing of its currency, should it not be able to create adequate jobs for its citizens, should its investment in Israel – estimated at $8.2 million per day for a population that is approximately 7 million – impair its stability, should the people of America awaken to the control AIPAC has over their President and representatives and the total disregard of America’s security as a result, then Israel could lose both the American veto that has protected it from world condemnation of its policies and America’s military support for its aggressiveness against its neighbors. That would leave Israel isolated, wrapped in fear, and psychologically unstable. Israel’s alternative can only be constant instability, never ending terror and war, hatred by their neighbors, innate, simmering self-hate, and mental anguish resulting from exclusionism that leaves open wounds of distrust and self-questioning, a state terribly close to insanity.

Is it not time for Israel to seek peace with its neighbors? Since no sensible person in the mid-east believes that the U.S. can act credibly as a broker for peace, Israel must seek other partners from the UN who can serve that purpose. It must be willing to accept as a premise for peace, justice as defined by the UN’s International Courts and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It must understand that the occupied territories must be returned to their native inhabitants, that the Partition Plan of November 1947 must be a basis for negotiations if only to provide a foundation for equitable land for both peoples. Modification of land distribution could follow as well as a means of providing for the rights of those displaced in the Nakba. The world peace body could serve to protect both peoples as generations come and go until a free movement of all is possible. Then perhaps we could say, men use thoughts to find justice and speech to communicate it.

In meeting rooms in London, Tel Aviv and Washington the dice have been thrown: snake eyes.

Flashback, 1963: When John F. Kennedy decided not to escalate the soon-to-be disastrous Vietnam war and issued National Security Action Memorandum 263 (NSAM 263), he signed his death warrant.

Scarcely six weeks after vowing to pull all American forces out of South Vietnam by 1965, Kennedy was dead, the target of an “executive action” orchestrated by the CIA, a coup d’état on behalf of America’s corporatist masters–the military-industrial cabal of hardline cold warriors who stood to lose billions if Kennedy lived.

That sweet little deal to “win” the war in Southeast Asia cost some two million Vietnamese lives, 58,000 dead Americans and precipitated an economic crisis which dealt a death blow to post-World War II prosperity and launched the United States on its inexorable glide path towards becoming a failed state.

Flash forward to 2012: We have Barack Obama in the White House; a fraudster who promised “hope and change” and instead led his wilfully blind constituents into embracing the third term of a George W. Bush administration.

Comparing Obama with Kennedy one can only conclude: They don’t make bourgeois politicians like they use to!

Following on from a decades-long drive to transform the Gulf into an “American lake” (under provisions of the so-called “Carter Doctrine,” another “peace loving” Democrat), the coming war with Iran is a transparent scheme to ensure U.S. hegemony over the vast petroleum resources of Central Asia and the Middle East–to the detriment of their geopolitical rivals.

U.S. and NATO naval forces on high alert threaten the free flow of oil in the Persian Gulf, the life’s blood of the global capitalist economy.

A war will lead to an oil price spike as Iranian, but perhaps also Saudi and GCC oil is removed in one fell swoop from the market, thereby setting-off a chain reaction that will exacerbate the West’s economic decline–to the benefit of financial jackals waiting in the wings who will gobble up what remains of America and Europe’s publicly-owned assets at fire sale prices in a desperate move to stave off the crisis.

Currently, Iran is ringed with military bases. American, British and Israeli submarines equipped with nuclear cruise missiles keep silent watch. Aircraft carrier battle groups carry out provocative maneuvers. U.S. and Israeli drones routinely overfly Iranian territory. Scientists are murdered in orchestrated terror attacks. Defense installations are bombed.

Economic sanctions, universally recognized as a prelude to war, strangle the Iranian people and their economy, all in the quixotic hope of inducing (coercing) “regime change” in Tehran.

The U.S. media, reprising their role during the run-up to 2003′s invasion and occupation of Iraq, are chock-a-block with scare stories that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are preparing to carry out terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States.

Indeed, the Shiite regime “may have” given “new freedoms” to Sunni Salafist extremists, including members of the “management council” of the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets also known as “Al Qaeda” detained in Iran and “may have provided some material aid to the terrorist group,” if an account published last week by The Wall Street Journal can be believed, which of course it can’t.

Meanwhile, the CIA and Mossad recruit, train and then unleash Salafist terrorists such as Jundallah or Saddam Hussein’s former henchmen, the cultic Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) for terror ops, just as they did in Libya when former Al Qaeda “emir,” the MI6 asset Abdelhakim Belhaj was appointed chief of Tripoli’s Revolutionary Military Council.

And what “evidence” did U.S. officials offer for these dastardly Iranian plots to murder us all in our beds? Why the now-discredited FBI fable which had a failed Texas used-car dealer, Manssor Arbabsiar, and a still-unnamed DEA snitch posing as, or actually a member of, the notorious Zetas narcotrafficking cartel, plotting to murder the Saudi ambassador by blowing up a tony Georgetown restaurant, that’s what!

Former CIA chief Leon Panetta, who replaced Robert Gates, also a former CIA chief, now helms the Defense Department.

Corporate media in Europe and America report that Panetta and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, have tried to “cool” the Israeli’s ardor for a preemptive strike and deny that the U.S. is preparing for war.

This too, is a carefully contrived disinformation campaign.

In a syndicated column for The Washington Post, war hawk David Ignatius wrote Thursday that “Panetta believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June–before Iran enters what Israelis described as a ‘zone of immunity’ to commence building a nuclear bomb.”

According to Ignatius, “the administration appears to favor staying out of the conflict unless Iran hits U.S. assets, which would trigger a strong U.S. response,” and that Washington’s alleged disapproval of an Israeli first strike “might open a breach like the one in 1956, when President Dwight Eisenhower condemned an Israeli-European attack on the Suez Canal.”

Ignatius’ unnamed “senior administration official,” since identified as Panetta, “caution that Tehran shouldn’t misunderstand: The United States has a 60-year commitment to Israeli security, and if Israel’s population centers were hit, the United States could feel obligated to come to Israel’s defense.”

In other words, should America’s “stationary aircraft carrier in the Middle East” launch a sneak-attack on Iran, hitting their civilian nuclear and defense installations, thereby inflicting “collateral damage,” i.e., the wanton slaughter of innocent Iranian citizens, if Tehran has the temerity to defend itself and strike back, the full military might of the imperialist godfather will be brought to bear.

Inter Press Service reported Wednesday that JCS Chairman Dempsey, “told Israeli leaders January 20 that the United States would not participate in a war against Iran begun by Israel without prior agreement from Washington, according to accounts from well-placed senior military officers.”

According to journalist Gareth Porter, “Dempsey’s warning, conveyed to both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, represents the strongest move yet by President Barack Obama to deter an Israeli attack and ensure that the United States is not caught up in a regional conflagration with Iran.”

Claiming that “Obama still appears reluctant to break publicly and explicitly with Israel over its threat of military aggression against Iran, even in the absence of evidence Iran has decided to build a nuclear weapon,” Porter alleges that “the message carried by Dempsey was the first explicit statement to the Netanyahu government that the United States would not defend Israel if it attacked Iran unilaterally.”

Holding on to the thinnest of reeds, Porter writes that Panetta “had given a clear hint” of the U.S. position “in an interview on ‘Face the Nation’ Jan. 8 that the Obama administration would not help defend Israel in a war against Iran that Israel had initiated.”

When asked by CBS host Bob Schieffer, who pressed the issue of a unilateral Israeli attack, Panetta said, “If the Israelis made that decision, we would have to be prepared to protect our forces in that situation. And that’s what we’d be concerned about.”

What are we to make of these claims?

If their purpose was to force Israel to rethink their attack plans, it clearly isn’t working. If however, Panetta’s remarks were meant to disarm domestic opponents of U.S. war plans, then mission accomplished!

“Speaking at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center’s annual conference,” The Christian Science Monitor reported that “Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak compared the current standoff with Iran to the ‘fateful’ period before the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when Israel launched a preemptive strike against Egypt.”

“The temperature is rising in Israel,” Iran analyst Meir Javedanfar told the Monitor. “He says that if the defense minister sees the current period as similar to the run-up to the [1967] Six-Day War, ‘that gives credibility to those who think Israel is going to launch an attack’.”

In a follow-up piece published Saturday by IPS, Porter now suggests that Panetta’s leak to Ignatius “had a different objective,” namely that the “White House was taking advantage of the current crisis atmosphere over that Israeli threat and even seeking to make it more urgent in order to put pressure on Iran to make diplomatic concessions to the United States and its allies on its nuclear programme in the coming months.”

Indeed, the “Panetta leak makes it less likely that either Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Iranian strategists will take seriously Obama’s effort to keep the United States out of a war initiated by an Israeli attack.”

Moreover, Panetta’s leak to The Washington Post “seriously undercut the message carried to the Israelis by Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, last month that the United States would not come to Israel’s defence if it launched a unilateral attack on Iran.”

Although there is trepidation amongst military planners in Tel Aviv and Washington should Israeli officials opt for a preemptive attack on Iran–and a retaliatory counterstrike by the Islamic Republic would have devastating effects on both Israel’s civilian population and U.S./NATO military forces in the Persian Gulf and beyond–should such disastrous orders be given, it is a certainty that Washington would follow suit.

This, in fact, is what the Israeli leadership is banking on and, contrary to sanctioned leaks to media conduits like Ignatius, is fully in keeping with Washington’s strategy of employing Israel as a cats’ paw to “drag” the United States into a war with Iran.

As the World Socialist Web Site points out, “any differences between the US and Israel are purely tactical.”

“Washington could, of course, use its considerable influence to veto an attack by Israel, which is heavily dependent on the US, diplomatically, economically and militarily,” leftist critic Peter Symonds writes.

Ignatius’ column however, “makes no mention of this possibility. In effect, the Obama administration appears to be giving Israel a tacit green light for an illegal, unprovoked attack on Iran, and threatening its own military action if Iran retaliates.”

Indeed, the right-wing Israeli publication Debkafile reported Saturday that while Panetta “has been outspoken about a possible Israeli offensive against Iran taking place as of April … no US source is leveling on the far more extensive American, Saudi, British, French and Gulf states’ preparations going forward for an offensive against the Islamic Republic.”

Accordingly, Debkafile’s “military sources” (read high-placed intelligence and military officials favoring an attack) “report a steady flow of many thousands of US troops for some weeks to two strategic islands within reach of Iran, Oman’s Masirah just south of the Strait of Hormuz and Socotra, between Yemen and the Horn of Africa.”

Debkafile also noted that “the Saudis this week wound up their own intensive preparations for war. Large forces are now deployed around Saudi oil fields, pipelines and export facilities in the eastern provinces opposite the Persian Gulf, backed by anti-missile Patriot PAC-3 batteries. American, British and French fighter-bombers have been landing at Saudi air bases to safeguard the capital, Riyadh.”

And with the Pentagon speeding-up arms sales to repressive Gulf monarchies and Saudi royals (with tens of billions in profits flowing into the coffers of American and European death merchants), the stage is now set for a bloody military confrontation.

On the so-called diplomatic front, as “useful idiots” and “accessories before the fact” in the drive towards war, the shameful part played by the International Atomic Energy Agency must be underscored.

Despite, or more likely because Iran’s top leadership have expressed their willingness to reopen stalled talks over their civilian nuclear program and have taken steps to do so, the United States and NATO are stepping-up their propaganda offensive, with the IAEA playing a leading role.

Indeed, The New York Times reported Sunday that “American and European officials said Friday that a mission by international nuclear inspectors to Tehran this week had failed to address their key concerns, indicating that Iran’s leaders believe they can resist pressure to open up the nation’s nuclear program.”

Times’ stenographers Robert F. Worth and David E. Sanger averred that an unnamed “senior American official described the session between the agency and Iranian nuclear officials as ‘foot-dragging at best and a disaster at worst’.”

Why is the onus solely placed on Iranian negotiators?

Because “members of the I.A.E.A. delegation were told that they could not have access to Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an academic who is widely believed to be in charge of important elements of the suspected weaponization program, and that they could not visit a military site where the agency’s report suggested key experiments on weapons technology might have been carried out.”

What Worth and Sanger fail to mention in their report is that Iranian officials asserted that before Roshan’s murder he “had talked to IAEA inspectors, a fact which ‘indicates that these UN agencies may have played a role in leaking information on Iran’s nuclear facilities and scientists’,” Russia Today reported at the time.

Protesting the killing before the UN Security Council last month, Iranian deputy UN ambassador Eshagh Al Habib said there was “‘high suspicion’ that, in order to prepare the murder, terrorist circles used intelligence obtained from UN bodies.”

According to the deputy ambassador’s charge, “this included interviews with Iranian nuclear scientists carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the sanction list of the Security Council,” RT disclosed.

Sound far-fetched, the product of Iranian “conspiracy theories”? Better think again!

As former UNSCOM Iraq weapons’ inspector Scott Ritter revealed in his 2005 book, Iraq Confidential:

The issue of uncovering incriminating documentation suddenly took on a higher priority, and the CIA, supported by activist elements within the Department of State, pushed for more direct involvement in the operations of UNSCOM and the IAEA. For the first time, the darkest warriors in the CIA’s covert army, the Operations Planning Cell (OPC), were getting actively involved in preparing intelligence for UNSCOM’s use.

According to Ritter:

The secret warriors of the CIA were accustomed to plying their trade in the shadows, far away from prying eyes. UNSCOM inspections, however, were carried out in full view of the Iraqi government, representing the antithesis of covert action. The existence of the OPC, as with any CIA affiliation with UNSCOM, was a carefully guarded secret. Officially, therefore, all OPC personnel were presented to UNSCOM as State Department ‘experts’.

In light of past practices by the CIA, or for that matter the IAEA itself, Iranian fears that their scientists are being set-up for liquidation are fully justified.

Indeed, the “cautious” U.S. Secretary of Defense, former CIA chief Leon Panetta, speaking at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany on Friday, echoed Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s claim that Israel would need to “consider taking action” should nuclear inspections and sanctions fail.

“My view is that right now the most important thing is to keep the international community unified in keeping that pressure on, to try to convince Iran that they shouldn’t develop a nuclear weapon, that they should join the international family of nations and that they should operate by the rules that we all operate by,” Panetta asserted. “But I have to tell you, if they don’t, we have all options on the table, and we’ll be prepared to respond if we have to.”

One of those “options,” passed by the U.S. Senate Banking Committee on Friday were demands made to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or SWIFT.

“The new Senate package,” Reuters reported, “seeks to target foreign banks that handle transactions for Iran’s national oil and tanker companies, and for the first time, extends the reach of Iran-related sanctions to foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies.”

The new legislation would target SWIFT with wide-ranging penalties if they failed to exclude sanctioned Iranian banks from the international system.

The bill now goes to the full Senate “where the likelihood of passage is considered strong,” The New York Times reported.

With the Orwellian title, the “Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Human Rights Act” Banking Committee Chairman Tim Johnson (D-SD) said that “Iran can end its suppression of its own people, come clean on its nuclear program, suspend enrichment and stop supporting terrorist activities around the globe. Or it can continue to face sustained, intensifying multilateral economic and diplomatic pressure deepening its international isolation.”

Now if only Senator Johnson offered similar demands on America’s Israeli allies who possess upwards of 200 nuclear weapons, refuse to join the international nonproliferation regime and carry out worldwide terrorist attacks with impunity, perhaps then diplomacy would operate on a level playing field!

SWIFT officials were quick to cave to U.S. pressure. “SWIFT fully understands and appreciates the gravity of the situation,” Reuters disclosed.

In its statement, “SWIFT said it is working with officials and central banks to find ‘the right multilateral legal framework’ to ‘expedite’ a response to the issues.”

“This is a complex situation, and SWIFT needs to ensure that it takes into consideration the implications to the functioning of the broader global financial payments system, as well as the continued flow of humanitarian payments to the Iranian people,” the organization said.

Needless to say, a boycott of Iranian financial institutions by SWIFT would be catastrophic to Iran’s economy, a provocation fully intended as a step towards war.

As the World Socialist Web Site noted, “if Israel does attack Iran, it will not simply be ‘a surgical strike’ that destroys Iran’s key nuclear facilities. Any Iranian retaliation will be used by the US as a pretext for a massive air war aimed at destroying the country’s military and infrastructure. As a result, any conflict carries a real danger of becoming a regional war that could embroil the major powers.”

Despite the evident madness of countenancing an Iran attack, political calculations by capitalist elites during a critical election year in the United States, with “conservative” and “liberal” factions angling for advantage by currying favor with the powerful Zionist and U.S. defense lobbies, Israel’s unambiguous message to the White House is: “We’ll give you the war, you give us the cannon fodder.”

In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Obama declared amid thunderous applause and a standing ovation from Congress, “Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal.”

Similar to sanctions legislation signed into law by Obama on December 31, the EU-approved measures ban imports on future and existing contracts beginning July 1 of crude oil, petrochemical products; as well, the measures forbid the export of equipment and technology to Iran’s energy sector.

The EU sanctions also hit Iran’s Central Bank, freezing its assets. Also on Monday, the U.S. Treasury Department announced new sanctions on Iran’s third-largest bank, Bank Tejarat; a sign that the administration intends to further isolate Iran from the global financial system.

The New York Times claimed that the EU’s “phased” ban on oil purchases “was needed to help force a shift in policy and avert the risk of military strikes against Tehran.”

France’s Foreign Minister, Alain Juppé, told reporters that in order to “avoid any military solution, which could have irreparable consequences, we have decided to go further down the path of sanctions.”

“It is a good decision that sends a strong message and which I hope will persuade Iran that it must change its position,” Juppé said, “change its line and accept the dialogue that we propose.”

Writing in Asia Times Online, Pepe Escobar rejected the foolish notion that the West is interested in defusing the crisis.

“The EU defends its strategy–or economic war–as the only way to avert ‘chaos in the Middle East.’ Yet the economic war may end up sparking the full-blown war it is theoretically trying to avert; talk about an array of unintended consequences waiting in the wings.

“The EU insists on spinning its so-called ‘dual track’ approach towards Iran,” Escobar averred. “Stripped of spin, dual track essentially translates in practice as ‘shut up, bow to our sanctions, stop enriching uranium and sit on the table to negotiate on our terms’”

“Senior EU officials,” The Guardian disclosed, “concede that the move could be risky and send oil prices rocketing at a time of extreme economic difficulty in the west.”

Reflecting the growing danger to the world economy by this stunt, “oil prices rose on Monday after the European Union agreed to ban imports of Iranian crude,” Reuters reported.

“Brent March crude rose 72 cents to settle at $110.58 a barrel, having reached $111.36 intraday but unable to threaten front-month Brent’s 200-day moving average of $112.19.” One analyst warned, “heaven knows what will happen between now and the first of July” when the EU’s date for full implementation of the embargo takes effect.

On Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned “that global crude prices could rise as much as 30 percent if Iran halts oil exports as a result of U.S. and European Union sanctions,” Reuters disclosed.

Accordingly, if the Islamic Republic stops exporting oil to the EU and other countries that join the “attack Iran” coalition of the feckless, “it would likely trigger an ‘initial’ oil price jump of 20 to 30 percent, or about $20 to $30 a barrel, the IMF said in its first public comment on a possible Iranian oil supply disruption.”

“In addition the oil embargo, the EU also decided to freeze the assets of the Iranian central bank, arguing that the aim was to choke off funding for the nuclear programme,” according to The Guardian. The EU’s move against Iran’s Central Bank follow policies put in place by the United States.

“The Iranian programmes are proceeding apace and represent a strategic threat,” an unnamed “senior diplomat” The Guardian. “The aim is to have a big impact on the Iranian financial system, targeting the economic lifeline of the regime.”

The Guardian also informed us that “David Cameron, the German chancellor Angela Merkel, and the French president Nicolas Sarkozy, issued a joint statement calling on Iran to suspend its nuclear activities.”

“Our message is clear,” the statement read. “We have no quarrel with the Iranian people”–a diplomatic cliché that generally means: do what we say or else–”but the Iranian leadership has failed to restore international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear programme. We will not accept Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon.”

In a day filled with joint statements by imperial shills, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (Henry Kissinger’s wunderkind in Obama’s cabinet) and Secretary of State Hillary (bomb the Libyans back to the Stone Age) Clinton said that “the measures agreed to today by the EU Foreign Affairs Council are another strong step in the international effort to dramatically increase the pressure on Iran. This new, concerted pressure will sharpen the choice for Iran’s leaders and increase their cost of defiance of basic international obligations.”

Commenting on the slow-motion apocalypse in progress, Robert Fisk wrote in The Independent: “Bring on the sanctions. Send in the Clowns.”

More Israeli Threats

How did America’s “stationary aircraft carrier in the Middle East” react?

According to Debkafile, a right-wing publication privy to leaks from Israel’s intelligence and military establishment, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that a “new round of sanctions will not stop Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon … stressing that Israel’s hand was always near the trigger.”

Barak’s comments were “aimed at cooling the optimistic notes emanating from Washington, Europe and some Israeli circles Monday after the European Union foreign ministers approved an oil embargo against Iran from July 1 and froze its central bank’s assets.”

The Defense Minister said “that because Iran had not stopped developing a nuclear weapon Israel had not removed any options from the table. We say this ‘very seriously,’ he stressed.”

Barak’s noxious statements were amplified in a lengthy piece published this week in The New York Times.

Titled “Will Israel Attack Iran?,” Ronen Bergman, a political analyst with the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper who, like Debkafile, has cozy ties to Israeli defense mavens, wrote: “After speaking to many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012.”

Speaking at the Davos economic summit on Friday, Barak warned “that a situation could be rapidly reached when even ‘surgical’ military action could not block the Tehran regime from getting the bomb. ‘We will know early enough whether the Iranians are ready to give up their nuclear weapons’,” The Independent reported.

“We are determined to prevent Iran from turning nuclear,” Barak said. “It seems to us to be urgent, because the Iranians are deliberately drifting into what we call an immunity zone where practically no surgical operation could block them.”

Barak’s message to Washington and the “international community”: “We’re ready to attack, now!”

‘Europe Will Burn in the Fire of Iran’s Oil Wells’

The new sanctions, coupled with escalating threats from Israel and the West are hardly “bridge builders” aimed at resuscitating stalled talks, but in fact are economic acts of war designed to force Iran into a corner.

Rejecting demands to “dialogue” with guns pointed at their heads, Iranian lawmaker Mohammad Kowsari, the deputy leader of the parliamentary National Security and Foreign Policy Committee told Press TV that “in the event of US ‘military adventurism’ in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran will respond in the shortest possible time by making the entire world unsafe for Americans.”

Kowsari reiterated Iran’s long-standing promise to “definitely” close the strategic Strait of Hormuz “if there is a disruption in the sales of the country’s crude, stressing that the “US and its allies will not be able to reopen the strategic waterway.”

Hardly fazed by Western threats, and apparently ready to take “preemptive” measures of their own, Seyyed Emad Hosseini, a spokesperson for Iran’s parliamentary Energy Commission said on Friday that “Iran has the world’s third biggest oil reserves and cannot be eliminated from global energy equations,” Press TV reported.

Hosseini said that parliament “is considering a plan to completely stop oil exports to EU members which will initially paralyze the economies of Italy, Spain and Greece.”

“Iran is powerful [as a country] and oil sanctions imposed by European countries will only harm the European Union.” Hosseini added, “Europe will definitely lose its oil war with Iran because European countries are grappling with numerous domestic challenges and disruption of Iran oil flow will lead to the escalation of domestic pressure and crisis in EU member states.”

On Saturday, Fars News Agency reported that “members of the Iranian parliament finalized a draft bill on cutting the country’s oil exports to the European states in retaliation for the EU’s oil ban against Tehran.”

Nasser Soudani, the vice chairman of the parliamentary Energy Commission told Fars that “the bill has 4 articles, including one which states that the Islamic Republic of Iran will cut all oil exports to the European states until they end their oil sanctions against the country.”

Soudani told Fars earlier this week when the oil cut-off bill was introduced, “Europe will burn in the fire of Iran’s oil wells.” Take that, Cameron, Merkel and Sarkozy!

Driving home the point, Bloomberg News reported Friday that “Fitch Ratings cut the credit ratings of Italy, Spain and three other euro-area countries, saying they lack financing flexibility in the face of the regional debt crisis.”

In addition to Italy and Spain, the ratings agency also downgraded the credit worthiness of Belgium, Slovenia and Cyprus. And with Greece currently negotiating with creditors on how to avoid a default, soaring oil prices would severely impact the ability of EU countries to climb out of the economic ditch and is a further sign that the 2008 capitalist economic crisis is accelerating.

Commenting, Asia Times Online political analyst Pepe Escobar again warned: “According to the EU sanctions package, all existing contracts will be respected only until July 1–and no new contracts are allowed. Now imagine if this preemptive Iranian legislation is voted within the next few days. Crisis-hit Club Med countries such as Spain and especially Italy and Greece will be dealt a deathblow, having no time to find a possible alternative to Iran’s light, high-quality crude.”

“Not surprisingly,” Escobar averred, “the losers lost in these Cold War tactics anachronistically applied to a global open market are the Europeans themselves.”

“Greece,” Asia Times pointed out, “already facing the abyss–has been buying heavily discounted oil from Iran. The strong possibility remains of the oil embargo precipitating a Greek government bond default–and even a catastrophic cascade effect in the eurozone (Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Spain–and beyond).”

Not that any of this matters to the Americans who are exacerbating the manufactured “Iran crisis,” partially as a hammer to beat down their EU competitors–under the tattered flag of Western “unity”–while gambling that war and their delusional hope for “regime change” in Iran will bring them one step closer to energy hegemony in Central Asia and the Middle East.

Eyes Wide Shut

Which brings us back to Iran’s “red line.”

“Tehran has repeatedly said that it would close Hormuz only if–and we should repeat–only if Iran is blocked from exporting its oil,” Asia Times warned.

“This would represent a deathblow to the Iranian economy–totally dependent on oil exports–not to mention the regime controlled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Regime change is the real agenda of Washington and its European poodles– but that cannot be spelled out to global public opinion,” Pepe Escobar noted.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told Press TV that “in the absence of Iranian supply, oil prices will go up and they (the Western states) know it. However, Iran will never allow itself to be in a situation in which it cannot sell oil but other regional states can.”

And how did the global godfather react to Tehran’s warning? Why with more bellicose rhetoric of course! The United States and their “partners” have pledged to “do what needs to done” to keep the strategic waterway open, U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder warned.

The ambassador added: “These situations, the choices are very, very difficult. I have not looked at the exact military contingency plannings that there are … But of this I am certain: the international waterways that go through the strait of Hormuz are to be sailed by international navies including ours, the British and the French and any other navy that needs to go through the Gulf; and second, we will make sure that that happens under every circumstance.”

The Defense Department announced last week that it will maintain a fleet of 11 nuclear-armed aircraft carriers despite budget constraints, as a threat to Iran but also to geopolitical rivals China and Russia.

Russia Today reported that “with Washington’s decision to deploy a second carrier strike group in the Gulf, the EU’s attempt to pressure Iran economically could greatly increase the likelihood of all-out war in the region.”

Ramping things up even further, Interfax reported Thursday that the U.S. “plans to deploy a third convoy of warships led by USS Enterprise to the Gulf in March.”

“The country’s second aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and its battle group entered the Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz last Sunday, accompanied by UK and French warships.”

Last Saturday, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told sailors aboard the USS Enterprise, that “the ship is heading to the Persian Gulf and will steam through the Strait of Hormuz in a direct message to Tehran,” the Associated Press reported.

While Iran reiterated its threat to close the narrow Strait, through which 20% of the world’s oil passes, Tehran has done so as a defensive response to an aggressive military build-up along their borders, the assassination of scientists, terrorist bombings of defense facilities, surveillance overflights by U.S. and Israeli drones and economic sanctions by the West that could crater their economy.

“That’s what this carrier is all about,” Panetta blustered. “That’s the reason we maintain a presence in the Middle East … We want them to know that we are fully prepared to deal with any contingency and it’s better for them to try to deal with us through diplomacy.”

Yet despite Israeli threats to “go it alone,” they do not possess the assets capable of mounting a decisive military offensive against the Islamic Republic.

On Thursday, Time Magazine reported that an unnamed “senior security official” told Netanyahu’s cabinet last fall that the prospects for “success” were “not altogether encouraging.”

“‘I informed the cabinet we have no ability to hit the Iranian nuclear program in a meaningful way,’ the official quoted a senior commander as saying. ‘If I get the order I will do it, but we don’t have the ability to hit in a meaningful way’.”

Short of launching a preemptive nuclear first strike on Iran, the Israelis will heel when the master whistles. Only the United States has the requisite military assets capable of inflicting damage on the Islamic Republic, but they are well-aware of the risks an Iranian counterstrike would pose.

As Global Research analyst Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya cautioned: “U.S. naval strength, which includes the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard, has primacy over all the other navies and maritime forces in the world. Its deep sea or oceanic capabilities are unparalleled and unmatched by any other naval power. Primacy does not mean invincibility. U.S. naval forces in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf are nonetheless vulnerable.”

Noting the findings of a Pentagon war game, Millennium Challenge 2002, Nazemroaya wrote that “even the small Iranian patrol boats in the Persian Gulf, which appear pitiable and insignificant against a U.S. aircraft carrier or destroyer, threaten U.S. warships. Looks can be deceiving; these Iranian patrol boats can easily launch a barrage of missiles that could significantly damage and effectively sink large U.S. warships. Iranian small patrol boats are also hardly detectable and hard to target.”

During that $250 million war game, the “scenario hypothetically pitted the Blue Team (representing US warships) against a Red Team that launched a coordinated assault using swarming boats and missiles–the kind of tactics Iran might employ,” The Christian Science Monitor reported.

Red Team commander, Lt. General Paul K. Van Riper, told The New York Times back in 2008 that “the sheer numbers involved overloaded their ability, both mentally and electronically, to handle the attack.”

“The whole thing was over in 5, maybe 10 minutes,” Van Riper told the Times. “It is not a matter of size or of individual capability, but whether you have the numbers and come from multiple directions in a short period of time,” the general cautioned.

“Iran’s strategy of asymmetric warfare recognizes that, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has little chance of winning any face-to-face military contest with powerful enemies like the United States,” the Monitor noted.

“Instead,” journalist Scott Peterson averred, “Iran aims to ‘exploit enemy vulnerabilities through the used of ‘swarming’ tactics by well-armed small boats and fast-attack craft, to mount surprise attacks at unexpected times and places’ which will ‘ultimately destroy technologically superior enemy forces,’ writes Iranian military expert Fariborz Haghshenass in a 2008 study based on published doctrines of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).”

“Part of Iran’s strategy includes decentralized decision-making.”

A “former European diplomat” told the Monitor that “the entire [IRGC] structure–if you look at how air defense is organized, the land forces, the combination of the Basij [militia] and the [IRGC]–this is all geared toward what they call the Mosaic Strategy, where you have individual military units who have a great deal of independence to decide what they can do without referring back to the center.”

“When the Red Team sank much of the Blue navy despite the Blue navy’s firing of guns and missiles,” the Times grimly observed, “it illustrated a cheap way to beat a very expensive fleet. After the Blue force was sunk, the game was ordered to begin again, with the Blue Team eventually declared the victor.”

Nazemroaya warned, “Iran would react to U.S. aggression by launching a massive barrage of missiles that would overwhelm the U.S. and destroy sixteen U.S. naval vessels–an aircraft carrier, ten cruisers, and five amphibious ships. It is estimated that if this had happened in real war theater context, more than 20,000 U.S. servicemen would have been killed in the first day following the attack.”

Undeterred by warnings from their own military experts, Washington and Tel Aviv are heading towards the edge of the cliff and seem eager to jump.

On Friday, Russia Today disclosed that the mysteriously “delayed” Austere Challenge 12 joint missile defense exercise with Israel “originally slated for this spring, will be scheduled for October 2012.”

Amid conflicting reports that first had the Obama administration, and then the Israelis, postponing the exercise, allegedly because “a series of events,” according to Inter Press Service, “impelled the Barack Obama administration to put more distance between the United States and aggressive Israeli policies toward Iran.” On the other hand however, Debkafile averred that Netanyahu called it off “as a mark of Israel’s disapproval for the administration’s apparent hesitancy.”

Well, it’s on again.

As Russia Today reported, the drill will “signal a surge of American troops to Israel by the thousands” and Iranian authorities “fear that the exercise will try out more than just the missile capabilities of the allies. Also being put to the test is Iran’s patience.”

“Now after a brief delay,” RT averred, “America will send thousands of troops and its anti-missile defense systems to Israel, albeit a few months later than planned.”

“With the exercise back in the books, it could mean that an eventual war between the US and Iran is still in the works–and now the world has a timeline to see it through.”

Indications are that Washington’s timeline is shrinking as the Pentagon accelerates plans to rush new weapons into the deployment phase.

The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that “Pentagon war planners have concluded that their largest conventional bomb isn’t yet capable of destroying Iran’s most heavily fortified underground facilities, and are stepping up efforts to make it more powerful.”

“The 30,000-pound ‘bunker-buster’ bomb, known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, was specifically designed to take out the hardened fortifications built by Iran and North Korea to cloak their nuclear programs.”

However, “initial tests indicated that the bomb, as currently configured, wouldn’t be capable of destroying some of Iran’s facilities, either because of their depth or because Tehran has added new fortifications to protect them.”

“The push boost the power of the MOP is part of stepped-up contingency planning for a possible strike against Iran’s nuclear program,” the Journal disclosed.

Having already spent some $300 million for 20 bombs, designed by military-industrial-complex heavyweight Boeing, the Pentagon sought an additional $82 million this month in a secret request to Congress.

Warning of the “grave consequences” of a U.S.-led attack on Iran, last week Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov described “the scenario Russia and the global community could face if things in the Middle East, especially in Iran, get out of hand,” Russia Today informed us.

“As for the chances that this disaster (a military attack against Iran) could occur, this question would be better addressed to those who keep mentioning this as an option that remains on the table,” Lavrov said in a comment apparently intended for Israel and the United States. “The consequences will be really grave, and we are seriously concerned about this.”

Pointedly, the Foreign Minister said “this will not be an easy walk, and it’s impossible to calculate all of the possible consequences.”

Earlier this month, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister and former NATO envoy, Dmitry Rogozin, warned that “Iran is our close neighbor, just south of the Caucasus. Should anything happen to Iran, should Iran get drawn into any political or military hardships, this will be a direct threat to our national security.”

Braggadocio aside, unlike the Millennium Challenge 2002 exercise, American forces will not have the luxury of a “do-over” if events really do spin out of control.

This is El Clásico in Bethlehem, a city where you either support Barca or Real; to support another team is at best unheard of, at worse disgraceful.

In a region which is dominated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has been for over 60 years, El Clásico provides a welcome break from life under occupation and a chance for Palestinian football fans to be like any other throughout the world: sing songs, curse the referee and yo-yo up and down off a seat for 90 minutes. And for the Christians in the crowd it’s a chance to drink the local Taybeh beer — brewed just a few kilometres away in Ramallah — and for the odd Muslim as well it seems…. as long as you’re elusive about it.

As one Palestinian Barcelona fan once told me “Our days and our conversations always revolve around the conflict, but when Madrid and Barca play, that is the only thing on our minds.”

Bethlehem famed as the birthplace of Jesus and immortalised in dozens of Christmas songs about little donkeys, shepherds and of course its famous son, is very different from the idyllic Christmas card image we see perched on our mantelpiece every December.

Today’s Bethlehem is surrounded by a concrete wall which at its highest point is over 8 metres tall — twice the size of the Berlin Wall — and has two crowded refugee camps on either side of it, each pocket marked with bullet holes. The residents of Bethlehem even need permission from the Israeli military if they want to travel the 7km to visit friends or family in Jerusalem. And permission is hard to come by. Life here is not one full of optimism.

But at the start of any El Clásico in Bethlehem, optimism is in abundance. Hundreds always gather to watch; their plastic seats sprawled across the ground in front of a giant screen, a looming military watchtower nearby, but ignored. The need for seats is minimal however. Men, women, children and families spend their time up on their feet shouting support in Arabic, English and Spanish: almost as if there is an unwritten code where the more languages you use, the better the fan you are.

The make-up of fans in Bethlehem is around 50:50; the almost identical numbers of Barca and Real fans make the atmosphere of the place electric. As with every encounter between the two teams, the tension is evident; it is fair to say that this game is more than just a game in the little town of Bethlehem.

Barcelona were the victors last night (18/01/2012), and for half of Bethlehem that means a night of celebrations which inevitably spill out onto the streets in the early hours of the morning. For the other half, it’s a night of what could have been. However the result in the wider context has very little relevance, the game on the other hand does. What happens in Bethlehem on the evening of an El Clásico: the excitement, the passion, the joy of winning, the sadness of defeat — allows thousands of people who have been imprisoned simply due to being Palestinian, have a sense of freedom like any other avid football fans throughout the world.

The occupied Palestinian territories are choc-a-bloc with Barcelona and Real Madrid fans; it almost makes the West Bank and Gaza, the place to be for such a night. This is despite a military occupation, where water, trade, vehicles and an impoverished people are managed by a militaristic nuclear power. Hats off to the Palestinians, because for an apparently ‘imagined’ people they sure do create an atmosphere rivalled nowhere bar the cities of Barcelona and Madrid themselves.

Today, however goes back to the daily grind: Applying for permits to farm your land and visit relatives, though you probably won’t receive them; making it to work without being fired because you were held up for hours at a checkpoint for no reason bar your age; hoping no-one you know falls ill, hospital treatment is never guaranteed. Never mind the daily humiliation of having your day-to-day life controlled, the threat of being attacked by militant settlers, or being gassed for non-violently protesting that giant wall that runs through your families centuries old land, rooting up your olive trees and livelihood.

There are slight sighs of boredom in other parts of the world, complaining that Barcelona and Real Madrid play each other too often in a year. In an area of the world where constant conflict grinds individuals down, that constant hope for victory in the next El Clásico is just what this place needs; and the more games, the better.

In his weekly newspaper Adler listed three options for Israel “to counter Iran’s nuclear weapons”. (Never mind that, unlike Israel, Iran does not possess nuclear weapons and that the latest assessment of Israel’s intelligence community – an usually honest assessment – is that Iran has not yet taken a decision to go nuclear for weapons).

Option 1 according to what Adler wrote “is to launch a pre-emptive strike against Hamas and Hezbollah.”

Option 2 “is to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

Option 3 “is to give the go-ahead for US-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.”

To make sure his readers got the message, Adler added this:

“Yes, you read ‘three correctly’. Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence. Think about it. If you have thought of this Tom-Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?”

Adler has since apologized for what he wrote. “I very much regret it,” he told the Jewish Telegraph Agency.

That was not enough to prevent an avalanche of American Jewish condemnation of him and his article.

The American Jewish Committee in Atlanta declared that his proposals were “shocking beyond belief.” Dov Wilker, director of AJC Atlanta said: “While we acknowledge Mr. Adler’s apology, we are flabbergasted that he could ever say such a thing in the first place. How could he even conceive of such a twisted idea? He surely owes immediate apologies to President Obama, as well as to the State of Israel and his readership, the Atlanta Jewish community.”

But the biggest blast of condemnation came from Abe Foxman who, as National Director of the so-called Anti-Defamation League, leads the Zionist campaign to smear all who criticise Israel as anti-Semites. He said:

There is absolutely no excuse, no justification, no rationalization for this kind of rhetoric. It doesn’t even belong in fiction. These are irresponsible and extremist words. It is outrageous and beyond the pale. An apology cannot possibly repair the damage. Irresponsible rhetoric metastasizes into more dangerous rhetoric. The ideas expressed in Mr. Adler’s column reflect some of the extremist rhetoric that unfortunately exists – even in some segments of our community – that maliciously labels President Obama as an ‘enemy of the Jewish people.’ Mr. Adler’s lack of judgment as a publisher, editor and columnist raises serious questions as to whether he’s fit to run a newspaper.

I have two thoughts to offer Mr. Foxman.

The first is that what is happening in America on the Republican side of the fence has about it the smell of what happened in Israel in the countdown to the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin by a Zionist fanatic. What do I mean?

There is today general agreement, even in Israel I think, that Rabin’s assassin was driven at least in part by an atmosphere of hatred for Rabin that was created by his political enemies led by Netanyahu. With the exception of Ron Paul, the Republicans who want to be president are creating an atmosphere of contempt for, if not hatred of, Obama on the grounds that he is “too hard on Israel (what a joke!) and not tough enough with its enemies.” By obvious implication the Obama of Republican campaign rhetoric is, or could be, a threat to Israel’s existence.

The second thought I have to offer Mr. Foxman is this. The answer to Wilker’s question of how Adler “could conceive such a twisted idea” is simple. He is brainwashed by Zionist propaganda.

As for my headline question, the answer is another question. Who knows?

“I once belonged to a wonderful religion. I belonged to a religion that allows those of us who believe in it to feel that we are the greatest people in the world—and feel sorry for ourselves at the same time,” says young Jesse. However, it seems that it didn’t take too long before Jesse found out for himself that what he was part of was neither flattering or glorious.

Jewish tribal cultural indoctrination is a full-on, comprehensive process. “Although I was fortunate enough to have parents who did not try to force me into any one set of beliefs, being Jewish was in no way possible to escape growing up”, says Jesse. “It was constantly reinforced at every holiday, every service, and every encounter with the rest of my relatives.”

Inherent to the culture and its maintenance is self-love. “I was forever reminded how intelligent my family was, how important it was to remember where we had come from, and to be proud of all the suffering our people had overcome in order to finally achieve their dream in the perfect society of Israel.”

Jewish ideological and cultural ‘programming’ is rather sophisticated. It is a unique dynamic pattern practiced in both a collective and an individual way. But those who carry the message aren’t themselves fully aware of their role within the tribal ideology they aim to maintain.

Of course Jews hold many different, and even contradictory, political beliefs. But however diverse their views may be somehow, those who are identified as Jews politically always unite against any attempt to criticise the cultural and ideological foundation of their tribal bond. Young Jesse is clearly aware of this. On the surface, it was the crimes against the Palestinians that provoked his ethical sense. “I grew more concerned. I routinely heard about unexplained mass killings, attacks on medical bases, and other alarmingly violent actions for which I could see no possible reason. ‘Genocide’ almost seemed the more appropriate term, yet no one I knew would have ever dreamed of portraying the war in that manner; they always described the situation in shockingly neutral terms.”

One of the most sophisticated tribal aspects of Jewish culture maintenance is the gradual manner in which criticism is silenced. “Whenever I brought up the subject, I was always given the answer that there were faults on both sides, that no one was really to blame, or simply that it was a “difficult situation.” This common Hasbara argument on the surface sounds reasonable but it ignores the fact that in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict there is a clear distinction between the aggressor and the victim. The Israelis are the ethnic cleansers and the occupiers. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are the expelled, the racially discriminated, the abused, deprived, locked behind walls and barbed wire in open air jails and, in some cases, even starved.

But Jesse seems to be made of the stuff of honesty. Unlike some of the Jewish leftists who presents a pseudo-moral argument only to gain credibility so that he/she can then vet the discourse, young Jesse presses on, stripping himself of any trace of choseness and exceptionalism. “It was not until eighth grade that I fully understood what I was on the side of. One afternoon, after a fresh round of killings was announced on our bus ride home, I asked two of my friends who actively supported Israel what they thought. “We need to defend our race,” they told me. “It’s our right.”

This “We need to defend our race,” is a common excuse Jewish activists use amongst themselves. Although Jews do not form a race, Jewish identity politics is still overtly racist. In fact, any form of Jewish secular identity politics is racially driven and fuelled with racial exclusivity. This applies not only to pro Israeli Jews but unfortunately also to Jews-only ‘anti’ Zionist groups.

I guess it is obvious where Jesse is heading. He clearly sees an ideological continuum between the civil right movement in America and the Palestinian liberation struggle. In both struggles, there is clearly a racially driven oppressor and a victim collective — and Jesse draws the necessary conclusion, “I felt horrified at the realization that I was by nature on the side of the oppressors. I was grouped with the racial supremacists. I was part of a group that killed while praising its own intelligence and reason. I was part of a delusion.”

Jesse has obviously identified the Jewish politics and culture of which he was a part, as a form of ‘racial supremacy.’ He never mentions Zionism, in fact, the word Zionism is not mentioned once in his sincere award-winning post. He simply speaks about his Jewish upbringing, the culture and the ideology.

Young Jesse has already grasped that an appeal to his Jewish friends is not going to lead anywhere. He writes, “I decided to make one last appeal to my religion… The next time I attended a service, there was an open question-and-answer session about any point of our religion… When I was finally given the chance to ask a question, I asked, ‘I want to support Israel. But how can I when it lets its army commit so many killings?’ I was met with a few angry glares from some of the older men, but the rabbi answered me. “It is a terrible thing, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘But there’s nothing we can do. It’s just a fact of life.’ I knew, of course, that the war was no simple matter and that we did not by any means commit murder for its own sake, but to portray our thousands of killings as a ‘fact of life’ was simply too much for me to accept.”

It seems that Jesse has the courage to redeem his soul. “I thanked him (the Rabbi) and walked out shortly afterward. I never went back…. If nothing else, I could at least try to free myself from the burden of being saddled with a belief I could not hold with a clear conscience.… I did not intend to go on being one of the Self-Chosen People, identifying myself as part of a group to which I did not belong.”

Surprisingly, Jesse wasn’t compelled to apologise for telling truth. He didn’t have to retract for telling things as they are. In fact he won the most prestigious humanist award for his essay. But I’m wondering how long will it take before ADL’s Abe Foxman and infamous Ethnic-cleansing advocate Alan Dershowitz launch a campaign to destroy the awarding college.

Being a person who oscillates continuously between being an ‘ex-Jew’ and a ‘proud self hating Jew’, I embrace young Jesse and hold him close to my heart. My dear young twin brother, journeying from choseness is a life-struggle. From time to time you may feel lonely but you are never alone. Humanity and humanism are there at your side – for all time.

Every few years the media becomes captivated by Israeli democracy. Commentators speak of right, left, center, and anything in between. Despite Israeli elections still being a year and a half away, media pundits are already discussing possible outcomes of the vote against the peace process, economic reforms, social equality, and so on.

In a recent article, Israeli columnist Uri Avnery decried the fact that the main opposition to the right wing parties – “the Likud, the Lieberman party and various ultra-nationalist, pro-settlement and religious factions” – is no other than the center-left Kadima. The party, led by the “incompetent” Tzipi Livni, is allegedly in “shambles”. Moreover, left parties, such as Labor and Meretz, are not expected to pose a real threat to the right party conglomerate, despite their temporary rise in the polls.

As genuine as he is, Avnery is once again presenting the false hope of a savior emerging to save Israel from itself. Avnery envisions Israel being rescued from its ‘neo fascists’ and  returned to the over-romanticized scenario of old, when early Zionists supposedly dreamed of an Israel governed by universal ethics, true democracy, peace and social equality . “I fervently hope that a different kind of new political force will emerge – a center-left party with a clear and inclusive message: social reform, narrowing the gap between rich and poor, the two-state solution, peace with the Palestinians and the end of the occupation.”

But this is as far as the imagined narrative of a kinder, gentler Israel can possibly go. Many outside Israel struggle to reconcile familiar discourses of democracy and equality with the reality on the ground. True, the ailment is not exclusive to Israel itself, but few other self-proclaimed democratic countries have such a massive gap between mainstream political discourses and actual policies.

Recall, for example, what the media touted as Israel’s own ‘Arab Spring.’ Even those who knew Israeli history hoped for a fleeting moment that the mass protests throughout Israeli cities could actually challenge the political and social status quo in Israel. But not Seraj Assi, a columnist and PhD student at Georgetown University. Assi wrote:

The dirty secret of the Tel Aviv protests is that the bulk of those middle-class Ashkenazi protestors are moved by a racist hysteria. They are simply afraid of being moved to the city peripheries and the far less fashionable parts of the country. For when they complain that they only feel at home in Tel Aviv, they explicitly express a racist desire to stay away from the development towns and neighborhoods populated by Arabs, poor Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews.

Indeed, the protests labored to stay clear of contentious discussions of military occupation, war, and even racial inequality within Israeli itself.

Not even the one-sided war on Gaza, which resulted in the killing of over 1400 Palestinians, was enough to raise the level of mass consciousness to challenge political and military apparatuses in Israel in any meaningful way. Under the title, ‘The Moral and Military Meltdown in Israel’, Hamid Dabashi, Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, wrote: “It is not just the worst of the Israelis who (according to a recent poll by Haaretz) condone and actively support the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, but so have their very best, their intellectuals, professors, journalists, filmmakers, novelists and poets, from Amos Oz to David Grossman to A. B. Yehoshua to Meir Shalev and scores of others” (Jan 12, 2009).

While right wing Israeli parties are often dismissed as anti-peace and hawkish, the ‘liberal’ Zionists in the Israeli Left have been viewed by some as an alternative, capable of righting wrongs and achieving the long-awaited peace. These are mere ‘delusions’, argued Roger Sheety in a recent article. “Scratch just a little below the surface and you discover that .. when it approaches the Palestinian person in particular, (Liberal Zionism) suddenly stops and fully reverses itself,” he wrote (Jan 9).

Sheety suggests a “clear and concise word for this phenomenon — hypocrisy.” But ‘hypocrisy’ might be too easy a term to explain this very involved trend in Israeli politics, which defined the Zionist movement long before the state of Israel was established in 1948. A most compelling book by Israeli author Tikva Honig-Parnass traces the roots of liberal Zionism from an insider perspective. False Prophets of Peace: Liberal Zionism and the Struggle for Palestine is a profound addition to a growing library that challenges ‘liberal’ Zionists’ claim to liberalism or progressiveness.

After reading Honig-Parnass’ book, one is left with a clear impression that liberal Zionists are neither ‘Israel’s best’ and nor is their double-speak a simple reflection of hypocrisy. Liberal Zionists were, and remain, at the heart of the problem. After all, the Israeli Right didn’t emerge as a powerful player in politics until the late 1970s. All that proceeded – the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing, the Law of Return, the 1967 war and further colonial expansion, and even the war on Gaza in 2008-09 – were orchestrated by Israel’s Zionist Left leaderships. More, the “systematic institutional discrimination against Palestinian citizens was (also) applied through the strengthened power of the Zionist Left,” Honig-Parnass argues. Even the most ‘radical’ forces in Israel are tainted, as the Zionist Labor movement rallied around racial discrimination against non-Jews before the establishment of Israel; later laws made racial discrimination against non-Jewish laborers the status quo, as is the case today.

To hold hope in the new election cycle in Israel is like waiting for false prophets. No salvation will be heralded by some imagined center-left party that will bring “an end to the ultra-rightist frenzy,” as hoped by Avnery.

The task will not be easy, but a true shift in Israeli politics can only occur at the foundational level by confronting the country’s Apartheid-like political institutions. More, by challenging the “Zionist Left political and ideological perspectives,” a way could open for “progressive forces among Jews and Palestinians to fight together against the Zionist/Jewish state,” as suggested by Honig-Parnass.

The purpose of the draconian 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law was to lock up any Palestinian who managed to slip past the snipers guarding the new state’s borders. Israel believed only savage punishment and deterrence could ensure it maintained the overwhelming Jewish majority it had recently created through a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Fast-forward six decades and Israel is relying on the infiltration law again, this time to prevent a supposedly new threat to its existence: the arrival each year of several thousand desperate African asylum seekers.

As it did with the Palestinians many years ago, Israel has criminalised these new refugees — in their case, for fleeing persecution, war or economic collapse. Whole families can now be locked up, without a trial, for three years while a deportation order is sought and enforced, and Israelis who offer them assistance risk jail sentences of up to 15 years.

Israel’s intention is apparently to put as many of these refugees behind bars as possible, and dissuade others from following in their footsteps.

To cope, officials have approved the building of an enormous detention camp, operated by Israel’s prison service, to contain 10,000 of these unwelcome arrivals. That will make it the largest holding facility of its kind in the world — according to Amnesty International, it will be three times bigger than the next largest, in the much more populous, and divine retribution-loving, US state of Texas.

Israeli critics of the law fear their country is failing in its moral duty to help those fleeing persecution, thereby betraying the Jewish people’s own experiences of suffering and oppression. But the Israeli government and the large majority of legislators who backed the law — like their predecessors in the 1950s — have drawn a very different conclusion from history.

The new infiltration law is the latest in a set of policies fortifying Israel’s status as the world’s first “bunker state” — and one designed to be as ethnically pure as possible. The concept was expressed most famously by an earlier prime minister, Ehud Barak, now the defence minister, who called Israel “a villa in the jungle”, relegating the country’s neighbours to the status of wild animals.

Barak and his successors have been turning this metaphor into a physical reality, slowly sealing off their state from the rest of the region at astronomical cost, much of it subsidised by US taxpayers. Their ultimate goal is to make Israel so impervious to outside influence that no concessions for peace, such as agreeing to a Palestinian state, need ever be made with the “beasts” around them.

The most tangible expression of this mentality has been a frenzy of wall-building. The best-known are those erected around the Palestinian territories: first Gaza, then the areas of the West Bank Israel is not intending to annex – or, at least, not yet.

The northern border is already one of the most heavily militarised in the world — as Lebanese and Syrian protesters found to great cost last summer when dozens were shot dead and wounded as they approached or stormed the fences there. And Israel has a proposal in the drawer for another wall along the border with Jordan, much of which is already mined.

The only remaining border, the 260km one with Egypt, is currently being closed with another gargantuan wall. The plans were agreed before last year’s Arab revolutions but have gained fresh impetus with the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Israel is not only well advanced on the walls of the bunker; it is also working round the clock on the roof. It has three missile-defence systems in various stages of development, including the revealingly named “Iron Dome”, as well as US Patriot batteries stationed on its soil. The interception systems are supposed to neutralise any combination of short and long-range missile attacks Israel’s neighbours might launch.

But there is a flaw in the design of this shelter, one that is apparent even to its architects. Israel is sealing itself in with some of the very “animals” the villa is supposed to exclude: not only the African refugees, but also 1.5 million “Israeli Arabs”, descendants of the small number of Palestinians who avoided expulsion in 1948.

This has been the chief motive for the steady stream of anti-democratic measures by the government and parliament that is rapidly turning into a torrent. It is also the reason for the Israeli leadership’s new-found demand that the Palestinians recognise Israel’s Jewishness; its obsessions with loyalty; and the growing appeal of population exchange schemes.

In the face of the legislative assault, Israel’s Supreme Court has grown ever more complicit. Last week, it sullied its reputation by upholding a law that tears apart families by denying tens of thousands of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship the right to live with their Palestinian spouse in Israel — “ethnic cleansing” by other means, as leading Israeli commentator Gideon Levy noted.

Back in the early 1950s, the Israeli army shot dead thousands of unarmed Palestinians as they tried to reclaim property that had been stolen from them. These many years later, Israel appears no less determined to keep non-Jews out of its precious villa.

The bunker state is almost finished, and with it the dream of Israel’s founders is about to be realised.

“If Israel apologises to the people of the Gaza genocide, we may reduce the attacks,” said Saudi Hacker OxOmar to Ynet in an interview via email. “I want to harm Israel in any way possible. Hitting Israel in the pocket is certainly where it hurts. “I’ll Make the Israeli authorities cry ” warned OxOmar who operates from Mexico.

OxOmar wasn’t very happy with Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who called the Hacker’s attacks an act of “terrorism”. Ayalon also warned that hackers may have to bear the consequences. He obviously referred to Israeli vengeance. But OxOmar seems to be resilient, “If the Israeli authorities, and especially Danny Ayalon, apologise to me and the people in Gaza, I may reduce my attacks,” he said. “Ayalon has to apologise for threatening to kill me, and Israel should also apologise for the massacre in Sabra and Shatila.”

Needless to say that the Jewish State is pretty devastated by the Idea that a bunch of ‘indigenous Arabs’ are far more technologically advanced than its own chosen cyber pirates.

I guess that this Cyber attack on Israel is a clear warning to Britain and America. Every cyber tactic implemented against Israel could easily be employed against Britain, America or any other Western State or institution. If Israeli banks are vulnerable, there is no reason to suspect that HBSC or Lloyds are much safer.

A miscalculation, or deliberate provocation by the West designed to maneuver the Iranians into “firing the first shot,” could have disastrous consequences far beyond the confines of the Persian Gulf.

That provocation wasn’t long in coming.

Despite an agreement reached by Iran with the P 5+1 group of nations (Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States and Germany), to restart talks in Turkey over the nuclear issue, the CIA-Mossad-MEK terror campaign took a dark turn this week; a sign that the imperialist powers, spearheaded by the United States, aim to scupper negotiations even before they start.

On Tuesday, an Iranian university professor, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, 32, a chemistry expert and director of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, was murdered after two assailants on a motorcycle attached magnetic bombs to his car.

Analyst Richard Silverstein wrote on the Tikun Olam web site Wednesday that “my own confidential Israeli source confirms today’s murder was the work of the Mossad and MEK, as have been a number of previous operations I’ve reported here.”

Silverstein averred that “the method recalls another series of assassinations that occurred of Fereidoun Abbassi Davani (who was seriously wounded) and his colleague Majid Shahriari (who was killed). Today’s killing occurred two years to the day after the assassination of another scientist, Masoud Ali Mohammadi.”

According to Fars News Agency, the blasts which killed Roshan “also wounded two other Iranian nationals in Seyed Khandan neighborhood in Northern Tehran.”

The scientist”s driver, Reza Qashqavi, who was severely injured in the blast, “died of his wounds in Resalat Hospital a few hours later,” Fars reported.

What makes Roshan’s murder especially troubling is that according to political analyst Seyyed Mohamed Marandi, the “IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] officials had met him [Ahmadi Roshan] earlier.”

Marandi charged that all of the Iranian scientists who had been targeted and then subsequently murdered in terrorist attacks “have had their names given by the IAEA to third parties,” Press TV reported.

“It is obvious that Western intelligence agencies are carrying out these attacks, or if the Israelis are carrying them out, it is with the knowledge of the Europeans and Americans. Because these agencies are very closely aligned to one another, they cooperate extensively, they exchange information,” Marandi said.

While no one has claimed authorship of the terrorist outrage, the Associated Press reported that IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz testified in closed session to the Israeli Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that America’s proxy, Israel, was engaged in sabotaging Iran’s nuclear program through a series of “unnatural acts.”

“2012 is expected to be a critical year for Iran,” Gantz told the committee, citing “the confluence of efforts to advance the nuclear program, internal leadership changes, continued international pressure and things that happen to it unnaturally.”

Roshan was the fourth scientist killed in a series of assassinations since January 2010 and follows a series of attacks on defense and nuclear facilities.

In early November, a massive bomb blast at the sprawling Bid Ganeh missile base 25 miles west of Tehran killed upwards of 30 members of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including Major General Hassan Moqqadam, a senior leader of Iran’s missile program.

Later that month, a huge explosion was reported at Iran’s uranium conversion facility in Isfahan. Though Iranian officials denied an attack took place, The Times reported that “satellite imagery … clearly showed billowing smoke and destruction.”

U.S. officials, as is their wont, responded in typical fashion–they blamed the victims.

State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland said she had “no information one way or the other” about the scientist’s murder, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced Iran for their “provocative rhetoric” and issued a categorical denial that the U.S. was organizing terrorism inside the Islamic Republic.

However, in an interview with the Hebrew-language Ma’ariv daily, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro said that “Washington is preparing to undertake any measure to thwart Iran’s nuclear program,” Xinhua reported.

“We’ve said and I say again that all options are open … President (Barack) Obama clearly and consistently says that he will do everything and resort to all necessary means to prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons, and he means every word,” Shapiro said.

Shapiro’s statement, if not quite an open admission, is a sign of Washington’s boundless hypocrisy as it supposedly wages a so-called “War on Terror” while organizing terrorist attacks on governments it has targeted for regime change.

Iran, and China, Strike a Defiant Note

With a new round of economic sanctions targeting Iran’s ability to sell its oil on international markets signed into law by President Obama last week, and with the European Union threatening to do the same, it was unlikely that the Iranian government, or their principle trading partner, would sit idly by and allow the West to damage their respective economies.

Although The Washington Post reported Tuesday that “a senior U.S. intelligence official” said that “the goal of U.S. and other sanctions against Iran is regime collapse,” the quote was quickly yanked from their web site.

The Post claimed the earlier account was “incorrectly reported” and that “an updated version clarifies the official’s remarks,” a fallacious climb-down that revealed far more than Washington intended to say the least!

The European Union announced that a meeting of foreign ministers would be held January 23, a week earlier than originally planned, to finalize an agreement on a comprehensive oil embargo.

While the EU and some Asian oil-buying nations are caving-in to Washington’s demands, America’s geopolitical rival and largest creditor, China, has rejected calls to put the squeeze on Tehran.

With U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in Beijing this week, the Washington Post reported that the former Kissinger Associates henchman in Obama’s cabinet “is expected to press China’s leaders to reduce the country’s oil imports from Iran.”

He is unlikely to find a receptive ear, however.

China’s vice foreign minister responsible for U.S. relations, Cui Tiankai, said on Monday that “the normal trade relations and energy cooperation between China and Iran have nothing to do with the nuclear issue. We should not mix issues of different natures, and China’s legitimate concerns and demands should be respected.”

Having blasted the new sanctions regime imposed last week, China, the third largest buyer of Iranian crude, said new restrictions would not affect business in the least.

The Associated Press reported that “about 11 percent of China’s oil imports in 2011 came from Iran, or about 560,000 barrels per day, a flow that increased in the latter half of the year, according to oil industry analysts Argus Media.”

“The daily average for November was 617,000 barrels,” AP reported, “close to a third of Iran’s total oil exports of 2.2 million barrels a day, Argus said,” a sign that China is hardly intimidated by U.S. threats.

Rejecting U.S. and European claims that normal business relations with the Islamic Republic provided financial support for its nuclear program, Cui declared that “argument does not hold water.”

“According to this logic,” the vice minister said, “if the Iranians have enough money to feed their population, then they have the ability to develop nuclear programs,” Cui told reporters. “If that is the case, should we also deny Iran the opportunity to feed its population?”

Cui’s pointed remark was an obvious jab at the U.S. sanctions regime which targeted Iraq for more than a decade prior to the 2003 invasion. Sanctions, which former UN official Dennis Halliday called “genocide” back in 1999, were estimated to have caused the death of upwards of 1.7. million people, including some 500,000 children, a “price” which former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said was “worth it.”

Undeterred by American threats, Press TV disclosed Sunday that “a senior Iranian lawmaker says the aim of the upcoming naval drills by the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) is to prepare for the potential closure of the strategic Hormuz Strait.”

Iranian naval officials announced January 5 that they “would be holding a major military maneuver in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz in February.”

“IRGC’s Naval Commander Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi said the drills, the seventh in a series of military exercises dubbed the Great Prophet, will be different compared to previous naval maneuvers held by the IRGC,” Press TV reported.

Pointedly, the deputy head of the parliamentary National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, Esmail Kowsari, said that “the military maneuver has been designed to prepare the armed forces for receiving the order to shut down the strait within the shortest time possible.”

The semiofficial Iranian news outlet also reported Sunday that the “Commander of Iran’s Ground Forces Brigadier General Ahmad-Reza Pourdastan announces plans to hold a massive military maneuver in the near future.”

“In line with the global developments and their own interests,” Pourdastan told Press TV, “Western countries are, today, using soft war [tactics] as the core of their strategy and it is [only] natural for us to have a defense [tactic] when the enemy starts a war.”

On Monday, Fars News Agency reported that IRGC Commander, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, reiterated his earlier warning that “any enemy move, even the slightest aggressions, against the Islamic Republic would be reciprocated with a destructive response and will endanger the interests of the aggressor all around the world.”

Mounting U.S.-NATO Threats

Iran’s announcement that they will hold new naval exercises, followed a report by The Daily Telegraph that the UK will deploy “the HMS Daring, a Type 45 destroyer,” and this “will send a significant message to the Iranians because of the firepower and world-beating technology carried by the warship.”

In November, The Guardian disclosed that “Britain’s armed forces are stepping up their contingency planning for potential military action against Iran.”

In a controlled leak, Ministry of Defence officials told The Guardian that “military planners are examining where best to deploy Royal Navy ships and submarines equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles over the coming months as part of what would be an air and sea campaign.”

During the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, Diego Garcia was used by the the U.S. Air Force as a launch pad for B-2 stealth bombers during the initial phase of Washington’s “shock and awe” campaign over Baghdad.

It now appears those contingency plans have moved off the drawing board with the deployment of the HMS Daring towards the Persian Gulf.

The Telegraph disclosed that the ship “has been fitted with new technology that will give it the ability to shoot down any missile in Iran’s armoury. The £1 billion destroyer, which will leave Portsmouth next Wednesday, also carries the world’s most sophisticated naval radar, capable of tracking multiple incoming threats from missiles to fighter jets.”

Defense Secretary Philip Hammond warned Iran that “any blockade of the Strait of Hormuz would be ‘illegal and unsuccessful’.”

According to the Telegraph, naval sources have said that “more British ships could be sent to the Gulf if required. The second Type 45, HMS Dauntless, will also be available to sail at short notice.”

As Global Research reported in December, the United States has significantly increased military aid to Israel in preparation for an all-out war with Iran and that “the Pentagon dispatched some 100 military personnel to Israel from US European Command (EUCOM) to assist Israel in setting up a new sophisticated X-band early warning radar system as part of a new and integrated air defense system.”

Although “casually heralded as ‘military aid,’” Michel Chossudovsky wrote, “the project consisted in strengthening the integration of Israel’s air defense system into that of the US, with the Pentagon rather than Israel calling the shots.”

In a new development, Russia Today reported last week that “thousands of American troops are being deployed to Israel, and Iranian officials believe that this is the latest and most blatant warning that the US will soon be attacking Tehran.”

“Under the Austere Challenge 12 drill scheduled for an undisclosed time during the next few weeks,” RT disclosed, “the Israeli military will together with America host the largest-ever joint missile drill by the two countries.”

An anonymous Israeli official told the Associated Press “the drill would test multiple Israeli and U.S. air defense systems against incoming missiles and rockets. Israel has deployed the ‘Arrow’ system, jointly developed and funded with the U.S., designed to intercept Iranian missiles in the stratosphere, far from Israel.”

While U.S. and Israeli officials have called the drills “routine,” RT reported that “following the installation of American troops near Iran’s neighboring Strait of Hormuz and the reinforcing of nearby nations with US weapons, Tehran authorities are considering this not a test but the start of something much bigger.”

Iranian fears are fully justified.

With the United States and NATO ringing Iran with military bases and with the U.S. beefing-up arm sales to its regional allies, including recently announced plans to sell some $30 billion of advanced F-15SA war planes to Saudi Arabia and “bunker buster” bombs to the UAE, the stage is set for a confrontation.

In this context, the murder of an Iranian scientist just as a new round of talks were announced, is a clear sign that Washington is hell-bent on imposing its control over the Persian Gulf–through aggressive war–as part of long-standing plans to ensure imperial hegemony over the energy-rich regions of of Central Asia and the Middle East.

“To be internationalist is to pay our debt to humanity” says Fidel Castro and this can be read on many billboards in Cuba.

What is internationalism?—cooperation among people and nations, states my dictionary. The book of definitions maintains that internationalism is a principle of communism and socialism. It is the belief of ideological leaders such as Lenin, Fidel and Che.

Che wrote in his essay, “Socialism and Man”, that proletarian internationalism isn’t just a duty but a necessity. If revolutionary leaders forget this, Che wrote, the revolution will lose its inspiration and imperialism will benefit.

Che was also known for having severely criticized Soviet Union leadership for having lost its internationalism with the world’s proletariat and the Third World. Following up on Che’s critique, I find it important to criticize communist and socialist parties, and governments led by these parties, which let down people who are oppressed by, or invaded by, national or foreign powers.

Internationalism in action

1. Internationalists must support resistance fighters against invasions. Therefore, one must chastise political parties and groups that give political or moral support to those who call themselves the Iraq Communist Party as it is part of the Quisling government the USA terrorist state set in. ICP leaders live side by side the invaders in the Green Zone. That there are organizations in the United States, UK, Denmark and elsewhere, which call themselves communist or socialist parties and that cooperate with the world’s greatest terrorist state is incomprehensible, shameful, immoral and anti-internationalist.

2. The same applies to people who still support the Zionist state of Israel, which commits genocide against the Palestinian people. Millions of decent people have gotten together to support Palestinians in many ways, including Ships to Gaza. In Denmark, four groups of people have challenged the state’s terrorist laws by donating solidarity aid to the secular leftist PFLP which is part of the Palestinian resistance. Rebellion (Denmark), Fighters and Lovers, Horserød-Stuthoff Association (veterans of WWII resistance fighters imprisoned in Horserød and Stuthoff prisons), and TIB’s club (local carpenters near Copenhagen) have aided both PFLP and FARC, Colombian armed liberation movement.

3. Internationalist can not cooperate with US-NATO aggressive wars, which always have the goal of controlling that country’s economy and politics for capitalist profits. It is shameful that many experienced socialists and communists, as well as naïve progressive people, have backed up West’s big capitalist plans to take over Libya, and thus have bombed Libya back to the stone age. Denmark was one of only six countries that dropped tens of thousands of bombs on Libya, destroying much of it infrastructure, schools, hospitals…In fact, Denmark dropped more bombs on Libya than it has on any other country in its history, Afghanistan included. And the pilots were cowards as there was no resistance by Libya’s air force, already decimated.

This conflict has little to do with the Arab Spring movement. It is a conflict between internal war lords, with ordinary people involved who wished to increase democracy but who were misled by US-NATO whose forces seek to control Libya’s oil and avoid a gold-based currency that Gaddafi was promoting amongst all African countries. Now, US-NATO has placed a lackey government in Tripoli just as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq.

4. Internationalists must also criticize comrade governments, such as Cuba and ALBA governments in Latin America, when they make big mistakes regarding internationalism. We can’t be true comrades-solidarity activists by keeping our mouths shut when this occurs. Such is the case with their support of the brutal government of Sri Lanka, which practices genocide against the minority Tamil population. Ever since independence from Great Britain, in 1947, the majority Sinhalese governments and chauvinist Buddhist monk system has discriminated against Tamils. They have constantly been treated as second class citizens, their language and religions relegated to secondary status without national recognition. Even pogroms have been employed with the brutal murder of many thousands on various occasions. And since May 2009, following the end of a 26-year civil war, ethnic cleansing in the traditional Tamil homeland in the north and eastern areas is the rule of the day.

Cuba and ALBA have spoken only positively of their historic ties with the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), to which Sri Lanka is a member, but so are 130 other nations. One cannot, in the name of protecting each nation’s sovereignty, avoid critique when one or more of these nations oppresses or conducts pogroms and genocide against part of the population. Nor can we accept as an excuse the immoral geo-political game that nearly all governments of whatever color play.

We shall also criticize Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil and other Latin American progressive governments for helping the US and France in their ouster of the only decent and only democratically elected people’s president in Haiti’s history, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. These Latin American governments actually assist the US’s 2004 coup d´état against Aristide by placing occupying troops in the small country, seeking to dampen the people’s anger. These progressive governments should, instead, back up the people’s desire to bring their president back to state power, just as they sought to do for President Zelaya in Honduras where national capitalists and generals kicked him out of office, with background support once again by the United States government.

5. On the personal and organizational plain, internationalism operates when workers of a major firm ask people to boycott a product because of the mistreatment of the workers by the firm. This is the case with Coca-Cola whose workers in Colombia asked us to stop buying the “drink of the death squad” (David Rovics song), because it hires mercenaries to murder workers who seek to organize a union and struggle for collective bargaining. Workers in other countries, such as Guatemala, and farmers in India have asked the same.

It is with joy that I can state that here where we gather (carpenters’ hall in Valby, Denmark), this union is one of the few local unions and political or grass roots groups in Denmark that has boycotted Coca-Cola. This is something any and all individuals can do. It is just a soda drink. So drink something else. Boycotting Coca-Cola is just like boycotting all products from Israel and Sri Lanka. It is a simple act of solidarity, of internationalism.

Charlotte and I have just returned from a six week trip in India where two of my books (“Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka” and “Sounds of Venezuela”) were published by New Century Book House, Tamil Nadu. The Tamil book concerns the history and contemporary life of the Tamil people in that island-nation, and the need to act in solidarity with them. The Venezuela short book concerns this people’s efforts to create a better world for themselves and solidarity with all peoples. When people asked us where we are from we often replied that we are “internationalists”. Interestingly, many Indians understood our meaning and were pleased to think in terms of being brothers and sisters in the world.

This concept, and feeling, of brotherly love, of internationalism has taken off in a bigger way, in 2011, than in many decades. It started in Tunisia, and has expanded to the indignados in Spain, to the anti-capitalists in Wall Street and in hundreds of cities throughout the US and the West.

We have much to criticize and yet much to be glad for as 2012 opens. We must remember and appreciate those who set us off on this new anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist, non-violent and democratic revolution—from the martyr in Tunisia (street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi) and his Iraqi spiritual brother a bit earlier, shoe-thrower Muntazar al-Zaidi, to Occupy Wall Street protestors to Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and co-workers at Wikileaks, who helped spark it all by blowing the whistle on the war criminals. These modern-day Paris Commune resisters without arms—OWS and Occupy the World—are growing and they are presenting a vision and with it a program-in-discussion that must be studied and supported.

Internationalism is an endless struggle, an endless challenge. It does not end even when one or more of our political parties take over the governing reigns. We activists from the streets must always keep our wary eyes pinned on the leaders, regardless of their names, just as our clear eyes cast light upon humanity’s future.

Israeli politics is not moving against history only but is challenging world politics as well. Although the first Knesset of the newly born “state of Israel” voted on December 13, 1949 to move the seat of government from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and despite Israel’s annexation of east Jerusalem on June 27, 1967, which the UN Security Council declared “null and void,” both unilateral declarations have never been accepted and recognized by the international community, not even by the U.S., Israel’s strategic guardian.

More recently, while millions of Christians were celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem, on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem, and the birth of Christianity in Jerusalem, the scene of Jesus’ resurrection following his death by crucifixion, which is the cornerstone of Christian faith, the Knesset was, on Christmas day, scheduled to consider a draft law that would declare Jerusalem “the capital of the Jewish people” and the capital of Israel at the same time.

The fact that the ruling elite in Tel Aviv has made a prior recognition of Israel as a “Jewish” state a precondition for making peace implicitly and consequently applies to Christians as well, otherwise how could any observer interpret the still simmering crisis with the Vatican over the holy places in Jerusalem. The “Fundamental Agreement” signed by both sides on December 30, 1993, as well as an agreement on the recognition of the civil effects of ecclesiastical legal personality, signed on November 10, 1997, have yet to be ratified by Israel’s Knesset. Some in the Israeli media has been recently accusing the Vatican of seeking to hold control of “Jewish holy sites” in Jerusalem.

The Vatican in the past supported making Jerusalem a corpus separatum, an international city in accordance with the UN Resolution 181 of 1947; Israel’s non-compliance delayed Vatican’s formal recognition of Israel until 1993.

More recently, the Vatican renewed calls for an internal agreement to protect the holy places in Jerusalem. Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Vatican’s Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, and Vatican’s former foreign minister, declared:

There will not be peace if the question of the holy sites is not adequately resolved. The part of Jerusalem within the walls – with the holy sites of the three religions – is humanity’s heritage. The sacred and unique character of the area must be safeguarded and it can only be done with a special, internationally-guaranteed statute.

The only perceived threat to the holy places against which the Vatican is seeking protection comes from the Israeli politics of exclusion. Rabbi David Rosen, member of the Israeli delegation to the negotiations with the Vatican told the Israeli daily Haaretz on January 17, 2010 that Israel “has not been faithful to the pacts of 1993.”

The precondition of recognizing Israel as a “Jewish state” is rejected by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Israel’s partner in peace accords, and its self-ruled Palestinian Authority, the 22-member League of Arab States and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC); in a statement he issued on December 26, 2011, the Secretary-General of the 57-member states of the OIC, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, condemned the Israeli draft law that declares Jerusalem “the capital of Israel and the Jewish people” as “a direct assault on the Palestinian people and their inalienable and clear rights” and “a flagrant violation of international law and international legitimacy resolutions,” which affirm that Jerusalem is part of the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in 1967. PLO representatives considered the Israeli draft law a “declaration of war” and a recipe for igniting a religious conflict. The Islamic–Christian Commission in Support of Jerusalem, in a statement, said if the Israeli draft law is passed it would make Jerusalem “for Judaism and Jews only, which means there would be no freedom of worship in the land of worship.”

Israeli attorney and founder of Terrestrial Jerusalem, a Jerusalem-based NGO, Daniel Seidemann, wrote on November 30, 2011: “Cumulatively, Israeli policies in East Jerusalem today threaten to transform the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a bitter national conflict that can be resolved by means of territorial compromise, into the potential for a bloody, unsolvable religious war. This threat derives from Israel’s dogged pursuit of the settlers’ vision of an exclusionary Jewish Jerusalem.”

“… Today, Israel must choose between two visions of Jerusalem. On the one hand, it can continue pursuing an exclusive, largely fictitious rule over an already divided, bi-national city — exposing Israel to virtually universal censure and imperiling the two-state solution. On the other hand, it can pursue policies that can make Israeli Jerusalem, Yerushalayim, a thriving national capital, recognized by all, existing side-by-side with but politically divided from the Palestinian capital in Jerusalem, al Quds. To those who cherish Israel and understand what is truly at stake, the choice is clear,” Seidemann concluded.

What is much more important than excluding “a conflict that can be resolved by means of territorial compromise,” is that the Israeli politics of exclusion in Jerusalem, which could be summarized by Judaization of the holy city, is a roadmap to de-Arabizing, de-Islamizing, de-Christianizing, de-historizing and de-humanizing Jerusalem, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, and this could not be anything but a roadmap to hell.

Absolutely this is unsustainable Israeli politics.

Neumann reveals that Moshe Dayan expelled Palestinians even as late as 1951!

Despite some moments of remorse, the former member of this terror group tells the interviewer that he refuses to talk about the massacres, in particular, because he participated in them. He also tries to portray Palestinian villages as all made of straw and mud houses! Perhaps the selective amnesia that has afflicted almost all Jewish Israelis has not spared Neumann.

Warning to Palestinian refugees watching this: it can be really difficult to listen to parts of this testimony. I had to stop the video twice … the nonchalance with which Neumann describes (in clearly sanitized language) the forced expulsion, the killings of farmers tending their grapevines, … is overwhelming.

Many of the major institutions and economic relations which were cause and consequence of world and regional capitalist expansion over the past three decades are in the process of disintegration and disarray. The previous economic engines of global expansion, the US and the European Union, have exhausted their potentialities and are in open decline. The new centers of growth, China, India, Brazil, Russia, which for a ‘short decade’ provided a new impetus for world growth have run their course and are de-accelerating rapidly and will continue to do so throughout the new year.

The Collapse of the European Union

Specifically, the crises-wracked European Union will break up and the de facto multi-tiered structure will turn into a series of bilateral/multi-lateral trade and investment agreements. Germany, France, the Low and Nordic countries will attempt to weather the downturn. England – namely the City of London, in splendid isolation, will sink into negative growth, its financiers scrambling to find new speculative opportunities among the Gulf petrol-states and other ‘niches’. Eastern and Central Europe, particularly Poland and the Czech Republic, will deepen their ties to Germany but will suffer the consequences of the general decline of world markets. Southern Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy) will enter into a deep depression as the massive debt payments fueled by savage assaults on wages and social benefits will severely reduce consumer demand.

Depression level unemployment and under-employment running to one-third of the labor force will detonate year-long social conflicts, intensifying into popular uprisings. Eventually a break-up of the European Union is almost inevitable. The euro as a currency of choice will be replaced by or return to national issues accompanied by devaluations and protectionism. Nationalism will be the order of the day. Banks in Germany, France and Switzerland will suffer huge losses on their loans to the South. Major bailouts will become necessary, polarizing German and French societies, between the tax-paying majorities and the bankers. Trade union militancy and rightwing pseudo-‘populism’ (neo-fascism) will intensify the class and national struggles.

A depressed, fragmented and polarized Europe will be less likely to join in any Zionist inspired US-Israeli military adventure against Iran (or even Syria). Crisis ridden Europe will oppose Washington’s confrontationalist approach to Russia and China.

The US: The Recession Returns with a Vengeance

The US economy will suffer the consequences of its ballooning fiscal deficit and will not be able to spend its way out of the world recession of 2012. Nor can it count on ‘exporting’ its way out of negative growth by turning to previously dynamic Asia, as China, India, and the rest of Asia are losing economic steam. China will grow far below its 9% moving average. India will decline from 8% to 5% or lower. Moreover, the Obama regime’s military policy of ‘encirclement’, its economic policy of exclusion and protectionism will preclude any new stimulus from China.

Militarism Exacerbates the Economic Downturn

The US and England will be the biggest losers from the Iraqi post war economic reconstruction. Of $186 billion dollars in infrastructure projects, US and UK corporations will gain less than 5% (Financial Times, 12/16/11, p 1 and 3). A similar outcome is likely in Libya and elsewhere. US imperial militarism destroys an adversary, plunging into debt to do so, and non-belligerents reap the lucrative post-war economic reconstruction contracts.

The US economy will fall into recession in 2012, and the “jobless recovery of 2011” will be replaced by a steep increase of unemployment in 2012. In fact, the entire labor force will shrink as people losing their unemployment benefits will fail to register.

Labor exploitation (“productivity”) will intensify as capitalists force workers to produce more, for less pay, thus widening the income gap between wages and profits.

The economic downturn and growth of unemployment will be accompanied by savage cuts in social programs to subsidize financially troubled banks and industries. The debates among the parties will be over how large the cuts to workers and retirees will be to secure the ‘confidence’ of the bondholders. Faced with equally limited political choices, the electorate will react by voting out incumbents, abstaining and via spontaneous and organized mass movements, such as the “occupy Wall Street” protest. Dissatisfaction, hostility, and frustration will pervade the culture. Democratic Party demagogues will scapegoat China; the Republican Party demagogues will blame the immigrants. Both will fulminate against “the Islamo-fascists” and especially against Iran.

New Wars in the Midst of Crises: Zionists Pull the Trigger

The “52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations” and their “Israel First” followers in the US Congress, State Department, Treasury, and the Pentagon will push for war with Iran. If they are successful it will result in a regional conflagration and world depression. Given the extremist Israeli regime’s success in securing blind obedience to its war policies from the US Congress and White House, any doubts about the real possibility of a major catastrophic outcome can be set aside.

China: Compensatory Mechanisms in 2012

China will face the global recession of 2012 with several possibilities of ameliorating its impact. Beijing can shift toward producing goods and services for the 700 million domestic consumers currently out of the economic loop. By increasing wages, social services, and environmental safety, China can compensate for the loss of overseas markets. China’s economic growth, which is largely dependent on real estate speculation, will be adversely affected when the bubble is burst. A sharp downturn will result, leading to job losses, municipal bankruptcies and increased social and class conflicts. This can result in either greater repression or gradual democratization. The outcome will profoundly affect China’s market-state relations. The economic crisis will likely strengthen state control over the market.

Russia Faces the Crisis

Russia’s election of President Putin will lead to less collaboration in backing US promoted uprisings and sanctions against Russian allies and trading partners. Putin will turn toward greater ties with China and will benefit from the break-up of the EU and the weakening of NATO.

The western media backed opposition will use its financial clout to erode Putin’s image and encourage investment boycotts though they will lose the Presidential elections by a big margin. The world recession will weaken the Russian economy and will force it to choose between greater public ownership or greater dependency on state funds to bail out prominent oligarchs.

The Transition 2011-2012: From Regional Stagnation and Recession to World Crises

The year 2011 laid the groundwork for the breakdown of the European Union. The crises began with the demise of the Euro, stagnation in the US and the outbreak of mass protests against the obscene inequalities on a world scale. The events of 2011 were a dress rehearsal for a new year of full scale trade wars between major powers, sharpening inter-imperialist struggles and the likelihood of popular rebellions turning into revolutions. Moreover, the escalation of Zionist-orchestrated war fever against Iran in 2011 promises the biggest regional war since the US-Indo-Chinese conflict. The electoral campaigns and outcomes of Presidential elections in the US, Russia and France will deepen the global conflicts and economic crises.

During 2011 the Obama regime announced a policy of military confrontation with Russia and China and policies designed to undermine and degrade China’s rise as a world economic power. In the face of a deepening economic recession and with the decline of overseas markets, especially in Europe, a major trade war will unfold. Washington will aggressively pursue policies limiting Chinese exports and investments. The White House will escalate its efforts to disrupt China’s trade and investments in Asia, Africa and elsewhere. We can expect greater US efforts to exploit China’s internal ethnic and popular conflicts and to increase its military presence off China’s coastline. A major provocation or fabricated incident in this context is not to be excluded. The result in 2012 could lead to rabid chauvinist calls for a costly new ‘Cold War’. Obama has provided the framework and justification for a large-scale, long-term confrontation with China. This will be seen as a desperate effort to prop up US influence and strategic positions in Asia. The US military “quadrangle of power” – US-Japan-Australia-South Korea – with satellite support from the Philippines, will pit China’s market ties against Washington’s military build-up.

Europe: Deeper Austerity and Intensified Class Struggle

The austerity programs imposed in Europe, from England to Latvia to southern Europe will really take hold in 2012. Massive public sector firings and reduced private sector salaries and job opportunities will lead to a year of permanent class warfare and regime challenges. The ‘austerity policies’ in the South, will be accompanied by debt defaults resulting in bank failures in France and Germany. England’s financial ruling class, isolated from Europe, but dominant in England, will insist that the Conservatives ‘repress’ labor and popular unrest. A new tough neo-Thatcherite style of autocratic rule will emerge; the Labor-trade union opposition will issue empty protests and tighten the leash on the rebellious populace. In a word, the regressive socio-economic policies put in place in 2011 have set the stage for new police-state regimes and more acute and possibly bloody confrontations with workers and unemployed youth with no future.

The Coming Wars that End America “As We Know It”

Within the US, Obama has laid the groundwork for a new and bigger war in the Middle East by relocating troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and concentrating them against Iran. To undermine Iran, Washington is expanding clandestine military and civilian operations against Iranian allies in Syria, Pakistan, Venezuela, and China. The key to the US and Israeli bellicose strategy toward Iran is a series of wars in neighboring states, worldwide economic sanctions, cyber-attacks aimed at disabling vital industries, and clandestine terrorist assassinations of scientists and military officials. The entire push, planning, and execution of the US policies leading up to war with Iran can be empirically and without a doubt attributed to the Zionist power configuration occupying strategic positions in the US Administration, mass media and ‘civil society’. A systematic analysis of American policymakers designing and implementing economic sanctions policy in Congress finds prominent roles for such mega-Zionists (Israel-Firsters) as Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Howard Berman, Dennis Ross in the White House, Jeffrey Feltman in the State Department, and Stuart Levy, and his replacement David Cohen, in the Treasury. The White House is totally beholden to Zionist fund raisers and takes its cue from the 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organization.

The Israeli-Zionist strategy is to encircle Iran, weaken it economically and attack its military. The Iraq invasion was the US’s first war for Israel; the Libyan war the second; the current proxy war against Syria is the third. These wars have destroyed Israel’s adversaries or are in the process of doing so. During 2011, economic sanctions, which were designed to create domestic discontent in Iran, were the principle weapon of choice. The global sanctions campaign engaged the entire energies of the major Jewish-Zionist lobbies. They have faced no opposition from the mass media, Congress or the White Office. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) has been virtually exempt from criticism by any of the progressive, leftist and socialist journals, movements or grouplets – with a few notable exceptions.

The past year’s re-positioning of US troops from Iraq to the borders of Iran, the sanctions and the rising Big Push from Israel’s Fifth Column in the US means expanded war in the Middle East. This likely means a “surprise” aerial and maritime missile attack by US forces. This will be based on a concocted pretext of an “imminent nuclear attack” concocted by Israeli Mossad and faithfully transmitted by the ZPC to their lackeys US Congress and White House for consumption and transmission to the world. It will be a destructive, bloody, prolonged war for Israel; the US will bear the direct military cost by itself and the rest of the world will pay a dear economic price. The Zionist-promoted US war will convert the recession of early 2012 into a major depression by the end of the year and probably provoke mass upheavals.

Conclusion

All indications point to 2012 being a turning point year of unrelenting economic crisis spreading outward from Europe and the US to Asia and its dependencies in Africa and Latin America. The crisis will be truly global. Inter-imperial confrontations and colonial wars will undermine any efforts to ameliorate this crisis. In response, mass movements will emerge moving over time from protests and rebellions, and hopefully to social revolutions and political power.

It’s time for Zionist-funded electoral campaigns and solid promises to do the utmost and maybe the impossible for the “United States for Israel”.

The 2012 White House elections have unleashed a fierce race amongst the presidential hopefuls — who come this year in all colors, sizes and IQs — to kiss ass and suck up to the Israeli lobbies in the land of the free and home of the brave.

Sleeping with the enemy

And since all the candidates have consumed almost all the usual tricks to tout their own “do for Israel” credentials starting from accusing the Palestinians of hindering the peace process and denying Israel’s right to exist …. Right down to calling them terrorists, the republican White House hopeful, Newt Gingrich, has found himself in a position where he has to come up with a brand new trick that would enhance his approval rating in the race to the white house.

Being an expert on solutions for winning the future, Gingrich didn’t waste much time and decided to not only do the utmost but also the impossible for Israel’s sake by calling the Palestinians an “invented” people who could have voluntarily evacuated their homeland and chose to live elsewhere.

While I could conceal my annoyance over Gingrich’s outrageous and deceitful statement, which lacks both the minimum historical awareness and political wisdom, I find myself unable to hide my disgust of his disgraceful conduct.

Mr. Gingrich, as a presidential hopeful and a longtime politician, is supposed to be, in a way, representing the mainstream American diplomacy when he speaks to the foreign media — unless the Jewish channel is not considered that.

And if he as a person was not embarrassed to openly brown-nose Israel in that unprecedented and degrading manner, then he should have uttered those nonsense comments in a less public session, like at his country club and amongst the circle of Zionist financiers of his campaign who certainly would have been ecstatic to hear him ranting that way.

But for him to publicize this hate speech in a televised interview and furthermore repeat it during the presidential debates is an affront to the whole American diplomacy and a dangerous indication for a paradigm shift of that diplomacy in the Middle East.

Who allowed this plumpy Gingrich to act as Israel’s advocate while ironically running for the presidency of the United States? Who told him that he can put on his racist mask, erase decades of peace brokering, albeit not entirely successful, and start messing up the politics of one of the most volatile places on earth while hallucinating about its documented ancient history?

The Arabs and the Palestinians, whom he likes to see invented and therefore movable or even invisible, will not take his statement as a twisted attitude of some republican candidate but another proof of the American flagrant biased policy in the Middle East.

The last thing the United States needs right now as its troops are pulling out of the Iraqi swamp and being kicked out of the Afghan-Pakistan Death Valley is another (needless) stir of the anti-American sentiments in that part of the world.

Only Mr. Gingrich doesn’t think so. Appearing in his debates foolishly standing by his offensive remarks and apparently drunk with the encouraging feedback he gets from his Israeli friends, this former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives irresponsibly insists on sketching the landscape for the most dreadful political forecast in the Middle East.

It is ironic to see the millions of patriotic Americans rallying on the streets and literally occupying the country in protest over what they called the corporate greed and at the same time we find candidates like Gingrich so sick and blinded with greed they can’t feel the danger nor the shame in sleeping in the same bed with the real enemy.

How did America end up in that humiliating situation, where its presidential frontrunners are but a bunch of clowns who are always willing to dance to Israel’s favorite tune?

I take a look at all the 2012 presidential hopefuls and I fail to find any hope in them as they frantically compete with each other to suck up to Israel as if the American presidential polls will be held in Tel Aviv.

Mr. Gingrich has every right to brown-nose, kiss ass and suck up to whomever he likes.  He has the right to relinquish his national identity and pride … but he has no right to strip the Palestinians of that pride and identity while doing so.

Obviously, for someone that historically ignorant, Mr. Gingrich must have been tipped by one of his aides that what really troubled Israel recently is the release of Shlomo Sand’s bestseller book “The Invention of the Jewish People”.

Let’s talk history; history will tell who was invented

In that book, Prof. Sand attempts to prove that Jews now living in Israel and other places in the world are not at all descendants of the ancient people who inhabited the land of the Philistines in the late Bronze Age.

Prof. Sand is saying that nowaday Jews, who have been immigrating since over a century now to the land of Palestine, are but varied peoples that converted to Judaism during the course of history in different corners of Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean Basin and adjacent regions like in Yemen and Iraq.

According to Sand, the description of Jews as a wandering and self-isolating nation of exiles, who wandered across seas and continents, reached the ends of the earth and finally, with the advent of Zionism, made a U-turn and returned en masse to their orphaned homeland is nothing but “national mythology.” And therefore the Jewish people, historically speaking, and as Mr. Gingrich likes to call it, are invented.

But since Mr. Gingrich likes to see his ranting about the Palestinians as factually correct history …then maybe we should do it his way and talk history…only this time let’s do it right, but first I would like to introduce Professor Ze`ev Herzog to Mr. Gingrich.

Prof. Ze’ev Herzog teaches in the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University. He took part in the excavations of Hazor and Megiddo with Yigael Yadin and in the digs at Tel Arad and Tel Be’er Sheva with Yohanan Aharoni. He has conducted digs at Tel Michal and Tel Gerisa and has recently begun digging at Tel Yaffo. He is the author of books on the city gate in Palestine and its neighbors and on two excavations, and has written a book summing up the archaeology of the ancient city.

Prof. Herzog belongs to the modern generation of Israeli academic archeologists who have been digging, in a truly scientific approach, all over the land of Palestine ever since the establishment of the state of Israel but more extensively after 1967, in an attempt to reach some sort of a historical proof that would legitimatize the ancient Israelite story and therefore could back up and maybe make sense of the current Zionist land grab of Palestine.

After decades of extensive and arduous archeological excavations and search, Prof. Herzog and many other Israeli archeologists, such as Prof. Israel Finkelstein et al, reached a robust conclusion that somehow resembled Prof. Sand’s thesis of the invention of the Jewish people. Only in addition, they concluded that the greatest chunk of the Israelite story according to the Bible is a mere myth – the interesting parts of it copied out from both the Mesopotamian and the Egyptian mythologies and the remaining tedious details are just tribal narratives invented by the minds of the Hebrew scribes of the old testament.

Archeology and history of Palestine “Right or Albright”

Apart from the Bible, the first mention in history of the Philistines dates back to the late Bronze Age 1150-1200 BCE. They are unmistakably mentioned in Egyptian texts, as inscriptions on the walls of “Medinet Habu” the majestic temple of king Ramses III that documented the war with the Sea Peoples. The  Philistines are one of them, who inhabited the coastal land from Phoenicia down to Egypt. And the Philistines appear once again in the work of the Greek historian Herodotus in the middle of the 5th century BCE.

The archaeology of Palestine developed as a science at a relatively late date, in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The main push behind archaeological research in Palestine was the country’s relationship with the Holy Scriptures. The first excavators in Palestine were biblical researchers who were looking for the remains of the cities cited in the Bible.

Archaeology assumed momentum with the activity of William Foxwell Albright, who was convinced that if the ancient remains of Palestine were uncovered, they would furnish unequivocal proof of the historical truth of the events relating to the Jewish people in its land.  But it didn’t take long before “the spade and the Bible” school of Albright proved not right.

The biblical archaeology that developed following Albright and his pupils brought about a series of extensive digs at the important biblical tells: Megiddo, Lachish, Gezer, Shechem (Nablus), Jericho, Jerusalem, Ai, Giveon, Beit She’an, Beit Shemesh, Hazor, Ta’anach and others. The way was supposed to be straight and clear: every new finding should contribute to the building of a harmonious picture of the past.

Slowly, cracks began to appear in the picture. Paradoxically, a situation was created in which the glut of findings began to undermine the historical credibility of the biblical descriptions instead of reinforcing them.

The explanations became ponderous and the picture inelegant as the pieces didn’t fit together smoothly.

Here is a summary by Prof. Herzog, from his famous article “Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho” published in Ha’aretz Magazine, Friday, October 29, 1999 that explains why the harmonious picture of the historicity of the Promised Land collapsed:

Following 70 years of intensive excavations in the Land of Israel, archaeologists have found out: The patriarchs’ acts are legendary stories, we did not sojourn in Egypt or make an exodus, we did not conquer the land. Neither is there any mention of the empire of David and Solomon. Those who take an interest have known these facts for years, but Israel is a stubborn people and doesn’t want to hear about it

This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal territory. And it will come as an unpleasant shock to many that the God of Israel, YHWH, had a female consort and that the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the waning period of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai.

Most of those who are engaged in scientific work in the interlocking spheres of the Bible, archaeology and the history of the Jewish people—and who once went into the field looking for proof to corroborate the Bible story—now agree that the historic events relating to the stages of the Jewish people’s mergence are radically different from what that story tells.

In other words, the Israelite history is invented and therefore the Zionists could have settled somewhere else than Palestine — Uganda, for example, as had been proposed by Herzl at the Sixth Zionist Congress at Basel on August 26, 1903.

Indeed, Mr. Gingrich, the British Uganda would have been a wiser choice and a better place to accommodate the influx of Jewish immigrants … it would have saved the Palestinians the unnecessary massacres and the ongoing ethnic cleansing, but most importantly it would have saved us the aggravation of listening to your pathetic tampering with the history of Palestine.

This essay analyzes the changing contemporary context of imperial domination, especially the demise of longstanding client regimes.  It then examines the previous significant ties between western imperial powers and Islamist movements and regimes and the basis of ‘historical collaboration’.

The third part of the paper will outline the political circumstances in which the imperial powers embrace “moderate” Islamists in government and utilize “armed fundamentalists” in opposition to secular regimes.  We will critically analyze how “moderate” Islam is defined by the Western imperialist powers.  Is this a tactical or strategic alliance?  What are the political “trade-offs”?  What do imperialism’s neo-liberal clients and their new ‘moderate’ Muslim allies have in common and how do they differ?

In conclusion, we will evaluate the viability of this alliance and its capacity to contain and deflect the popular democratic movements and repress the burgeoning class and national struggles, especially in regard to the ‘obstacles’ posed by the Israel-US-Zionist ties and the continued IMF policies which promise to worsen the crises in the Muslim countries.

The Transition from Neo-Liberal Client Rulers to Power-Sharing with Moderate Islamists

The key motivation in Washington’s and the European imperial troika’s (England, France and Germany) embrace of what their press and officialdom hail as “moderate” Islamist parties has been the collapse or weakening of their long-term client rulers.  Faced with the ouster of Mubarak, in Egypt, Ali in Tunisia and Saleh in Yemen, mass protests in Morocco and Algeria, the US-EU turned to conservative Muslim leaders who were willing to work within the existing state institutional framework (including the army and state police), uphold the capitalist order and align with the empire against anti-imperial movements and states.  In Egypt, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) (the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood), in Tunisia the Renaissance Party, in Morocco the Justice and Development Party have all indicated their willingness to serve as reliable partners in blocking the pro-democracy movements that challenge the socio-economic status quo and the long-standing military-imperial linkages.

The Islamist collaborators are called “moderate and respectable” because they agree to participate in elections within the boundaries of the established political and economic order; they have dropped any criticism of imperial and colonial treaties and trade agreements signed by the previous client regions – including ones which collaborate with Israel’s colonization of Palestine.

Equally important “moderate” means supporting imperial wars against nationalist and secular Arab republics, such as Syria and Libya, and isolating and/or repressing class based trade unions and secular-left parties.

“Moderate” Islamists have become the Empire’s ‘contraceptive of choice’ against any chance the massive Arab peoples’ revolt might give birth to substantive egalitarian social changes and bring those brutal pro-western officials, responsible for so many crimes against humanity, to justice.

The West and their client officials in the military and police have agreed to a kind of “power-sharing’ with the moderate/respectable (read ‘reactionary’) Islamist parties.  The Islamists would be responsible for imposing orthodox economic policies and re-establishing ‘order’ (i.e. bolstering the existing one) in partnership with pro-multinational bank economists and pro US-EU generals and security officials.  In exchange the Islamists could take certain ministries, appoint their members, finance electoral clientele among the poor and push their ‘moderate’ religious, social and cultural agenda.  Basically, the elected Islamists would replace the old corrupt dictatorial regimes in running the state and signing off on more free trade agreements with the EU.  Their role would keep the leftists, nationalists and populists out of power and from gaining mass support.  Their job would substitute spiritual solace and “inner worth” via Islam in place of redistributing land, income and power from the elite, including the foreign multi-nationals to the peasants, workers, unemployed and exploited low-paid employees.

Why the Empire Arms Fundamentalist Anti-Secular Muslims

While the US and EU have backed respectable “moderate Islam” in heading off a popular upheaval of the young and unemployed, in other contexts they have enlisted violent, fundamentalist Islamic terrorists to overthrow secular independent anti-imperialists regimes – like Libya, Syria — just as they had done earlier in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia.  The US, Qatar and the European troika financed and armed Libyan fundamentalist militias and then engaged in a murderous eight months air and sea assault to ensure their client’s ‘victory’ over the secular Gaddafi regime.  Fresh from NATO’s success, the US, the European ‘Troika’ and Turkey, with the backing of the League of Arab collaborator princes and emirs, have financed a violent Muslim Brotherhood insurrection in Syria, intent on destroying the nationalist economy and modern secular state.

The US and EU have openly unleashed their fundamentalists allies in order to destroy independent adversaries in the name of “democracy” and ‘humanitarian intervention’, a laughable claim in light of decade long colonial wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.  All target regimes have one crime in common:  Using their national resources to develop modern secular states – independent of imperial dictates.

NATO  implements its campaigns through conservative ‘moderate’ or armed fundamentalist Islamist movements depending on the specific needs, circumstances and range of options in any given target nation.  With the fall of  pro-Empire ‘secular dictatorships’ in Egypt and Tunisia, pliable conservative Islamist leaders are the fall back “lesser evil”.  When the opportunity to overthrow an independent secular or nationalist regime arises, armed and violent fundamentalist mercenaries become the political vehicle of choice.

As with European empires in the past, the modern Western imperial countries have relied on retrograde religious parties and leaders to collaborate and serve their economic and military interests and to provide mercenaries for imperial armies to savage any anti-imperialist social revolutionaries.  In that sense US and European rulers are neither ‘pro nor anti’ Islam, it all depends on their national and class position.  Islamists who collaborate with Empire are “moderate” allies and if they attack an anti-imperialist regime, they become ‘freedom fighters’.  On the other hand, they become “terrorists” or “fundamentalists” when they oppose imperial occupation, pillage or colonial settlements.

Contemporary History of Islamist-Imperial Collaboration

The historical record of western imperial expansion reveals many instances of collaboration and co-optation as well as conflict with Islamist regimes, movements and parties.  In the early 1960’s the CIA backed a brutal military coup against the secular Indonesian nationalist regime of Sukarno, and encouraged their puppet dictator General Suharto to unleash Muslim militia in a veritable “holy war” exterminating nearly one million leftist trade unionists, school teachers, students, farmers, communists or suspected sympathizers and their family members.  The horrific ‘Jakarta Option’ became a model for CIA operations elsewhere.  In Yugoslavia the US and Europe promoted and financed fundamentalists Muslims in Bosnia, importing mujahedeen who would later form part of Al Qaeda, and then backed the Kosovo Liberation Army, a known terrorist organization, in order to completely break-up and ethnically ‘cleanse’ a modern secular multi-national state – going so far as to have Americans and NATO bomb Belgrade for the first time since the Nazis in the Second World War.

During President Carter’s administration, the CIA joined with Saudi Arabia’s ruling royalty, providing billions of dollars in arms and military supplies to Afghan Muslim fundamentalists in their brutal but successful Jihad overthrowing a modern, secular nationalist regime backed by the USSR.  The murderous fate of school teachers and educated women in the aftermath was quickly covered up.

Needless to say, wherever US imperialism faces leftists or secular, modernizing anti-imperialist regimes, Washington turns to retrograde Islamic leaders willing and able to destroy the progressive regime in return for imperialist support.  Such coalitions are built mainly around fundamentalist and moderate Islamist opposition to secular, class-based politics allied with the Empire’s hostility to any anti-imperialist challenge to its domination.

The same ‘coalition’ of Islamists and the Empire has been glaringly obvious during the NATO assault on Libya and continues against Syria:  The Muslims provide the shock troops on the ground; NATO provides the aerial bombing, funds, arms, sanctions, embargoes and propaganda.

These Islamist-Imperialist coalitions are usually temporary, based on a common secular or nationalist enemy and not on any common strategic interest.  After the defeat of a secular anti-imperialist regime, militant Muslims may find themselves attacked by the colonial neo-liberal regime most favored by the imperial west.  This happened in Afghanistan and elsewhere after the overseas Islamist fighters (Afghan Arabs) returned to their own neo-colonized, collaborating home countries, like Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Egypt and elsewhere.

Contemporary History of Islamist-Imperial Conflict

The relation between Islamist regimes and imperialism is complex, changing and  full of examples of bloody conflict.

The US backed the “modernizing” free market dictatorship of the Shah in Iran, overthrowing the nationalist Mosaddegh regime. They provided arms and intelligence for the Savak, the Shah’s monstrous secret police as it hunted down and murdered tens of thousands of nationalist-Islamists and leftist resistance fighters and critics in Iran and abroad.  The rise to power of the fundamentalist-anti-imperialist Khomeini regime fueled US armed attacks and provoked retaliatory moves:  Iran backed and financed anti-colonial Islamist groups in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Palestine (Hamas) and Iraq (the Shia parties).

Subsequent to 9/11 the US invaded and overthrew the Islamist Taliban regime, re-colonized the country, establishing a puppet regime under US-European auspices.  The Taliban and allied Islamist and nationalist resistance fighters organized and established a mass guerrilla army which has engaged in a decade long war with armed support from Pakistani Islamist forces responding to US military incursions.

In Palestine, Washington, under the overweening control of Israel’s Zionist fifth column, has armed and financed Israel’s war against the popularly elected Palestinian Islamist Hamas government in Gaza.  Washington’s total commitment to the Jewish state and its colonial expansion and usurpation of Palestinian (Muslim and Christian) lands and property in Jerusalem and elsewhere reflects the profound and pervasive influence of the Zionist power configuration throughout the US political system .They secure 90% votes in Congress, pledges of allegiance from the White House, and senior appointments in Treasury, State Department and the Pentagon.

What determines whether the US Empire will have a collaborative or conflict-ridden relation with Islam depends on the specific political context.  The US allies with Islamists when faced with nationalist, leftist and secular democratic regimes and movements, especially where their optimal choice, a military-neo-liberal alternative is relatively weak.  However, faced with a nationalist, anti-colonial Islamist regime (as is the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran), Washington will side with pro-western liberals, dissident Muslim clerics, pliable tribal chiefs, separatist ethnic minorities and pro-Western generals.

The key to US-Islamist relations from the White House perspective is based on the Islamists’ attitude toward empire, class politics, NATO and the “free market” (private foreign investment).

Today’s ‘moderate’ Islamist parties in Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Morocco (and elsewhere), which have offered their support to NATO and its wars against Libya and Syria, uphold ‘private property’ (i.e. foreign and imperialist client control of key industries) and repress independent working class and anti-imperialist parties.  They are the Empire’s “new partners” in the pillage of the resource-rich Middle East and North Africa.

The US-brokered counter-revolutionary alliance among moderate Islamists, the previous military rulers and Washington is fraught with tensions.  The military demands total impunity and a continuation of its economic privileges; this includes a veto on any legislation addressing the previous regime’s brutal crimes against its own people.  On the other hand, the Islamist parties uphold their electoral victories and demand majority rule.  Washington insists the alliance adhere to its policy toward Israel and abandon their support for the Palestinian national struggle.  As these tensions and conflicts deepen, the alliance could collapse ushering in a new phase of conflict and instability.

Emblematic of “moderate Islamist” collaboration with US-EU imperialism is the role of Qatar, home to the ‘respectable’ Arabic media giant, Al-Jazeera, and the demagogic Qatari “spiritual guide” Sheik Youssef  al-Qaradawi.  Sheik Youssef quotes the Koran and Islamic moral principles in defense of NATO’s 8-month aerial bombing of Libya, which killed over 50,000 pro-regime Libyans (themselves Muslims).  He calls for armed imperial intervention in Syria to overthrow the secular Assad regime, a position he shares comfortably with the state of Israel. He urges the “moderate Islamists” in Egypt and Tunisia to cease any criticism of the existing economic order, ( see “Spiritual guide steers Arabs to moderation”, Financial Times, December 9, 2011 – p5).  In a word, this respectable Muslim cleric is NATO’s perfect Koran-quoting “moderate Islamist” partner – a dream come true.

The Strategic Utility of “Moderate” Islamist Parties

Islamist parties are approached by the Empire’s policy elites only when they have a mass following and can therefore weaken any popular, nationalist insurgency.  Mass-based Islamist parties serve the empire by providing “legitimacy”, by winning elections and by giving a veneer of respectability to the pro-imperial military and police apparatus retained in place from the overthrown client state dictatorships.

The Islamist parties compete at the “grass roots” with the leftists.  They build up a clientele of supporters among the poor in the countryside and urban slums through organized charity and basic social services administered at the mosques and humanitarian religious foundations.  Because they reject class struggle and are intensely hostile to the left (with its secular, pro-feminist and working-class agenda), they have been ‘half-tolerated’ by the dictatorship, while the leftist activists are routinely murdered.  Subsequently, with the overthrow of the dictatorship, the Islamists emerge intact with the strongest national organizational network as the country’s ‘natural leaders’ from the religious-bazaar merchant political elite.  Their leaders offer to serve the empire and its traditional native military collaborators in exchange for a ‘slice of power’, especially over morality, culture, religion and households (women); in other words, the “micro-society”.

For their part, they offer to marginalize and undermine the left, anti-imperialist secular democrats in the streets.  In the face of mass popular rebellion calling into question the imperial order, a ‘moderate’ Islamist-imperial partnership is a ‘heavenly deal’ praised in Washington, Paris or London (as well as Riyadh and Tel Aviv).

Conclusion:  How Viable is the Imperial-Islamic Coalition?

Those who thought that the spontaneous pro-democracy movements spelled the end of the imperial order left out the role of organized “moderate” Islamist electoral parties as able collaborators of Empire.  The brutally repressed mass mobilization of unemployed youth was no match for the well-funded grass roots community organization of the moderate Islamists.  This is especially true when politics shifted from the street to the ballot box, a process that the Islamist parties facilitated.  In the absence of a mass revolutionary party seeking state power, the existing military-police state was able to work around the mass protesters and put together a power sharing agreement at least in the short-run.

In the November 2011 elections, the radical Egyptian Islamist party, Nour, gathered one-quarter of the vote in Cairo and Alexandria.  Their showing was even higher among the urban poor districts, which promises even greater support among poor rural constituencies in the coming elections. Essentially a Salafist Islamist party, Nour, unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, combined denunciations of class abuses and elite corruption with mass appeals to a return to a mythic harmonious life.  They used effective grass roots organizing around basic services in order to gain a greater proportion of the working class vote than all the leftist parties combined.  Nour’s message of “class retribution against the …abuses of Egypt’s elite fueled Nour’s new found popularity”, (Financial Times, December 10, 2011 p6).

Despite the successes of the Islamist-Imperial partnership, the world economic crises and especially the growing unemployment and misery in the Arab countries will make it difficult for the ‘respectable moderate’ Islamists to stabilize their societies. They are inextricably constrained by their alliances to function within the confines of the ‘orthodox neo-liberal framework’ imposed by the Empire.  For that reason, the “moderate” Islamists will try to co-opt some secular liberals, social democrats and even a few leftists as ‘minority partners’, so that they won’t be held solely responsible for dashing the expectations of the poor in their countries.

The fact of the matter is that the pro-imperial Islamist parties have absolutely no answer to the current crises:  Charities delivered from the mosque during the dictatorship won them mass support; now more austerity programs imposed from their ministerial posts will certainly alienate and infuriate their mass base.  What will follow depends on who is best organized:  Liberals are limited to media campaigns and tied to economic orthodoxy; the leftists have to advance from protest movements in the downtown squares to organized political units operating in popular neighborhoods, workplaces, markets, villages and slums.  Otherwise radical fundamentalist, like the Salafists, will exploit the people’s outrage with moderate Islamist betrayals and promote their own version of a closed clerical society, opposing the West while repressing the Left.

The US and EU may have ‘temporarily’ avoided revolution by accommodating electoral reforms and adapting to alliances with “moderate” Islamists, but their ongoing military interventions and their own growing economic crisis will  simply postpone a more decisive conflict in the near future.

Goldstone probably had no idea what awaited him. After the Mission published its findings and conclusions, the judge quickly became the victim of a vicious slander campaign. Israel’s Information Minister said that the Goldstone Report was “anti-Semitic.” Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz informed the listeners of Israel Army Radio that Goldstone was “an evil, evil man” and “an absolute traitor,” a “man who uses his language and words against the Jewish people.” Dershowitz later apologised for calling Goldstone a traitor, saying he thought the term moser (Hebrew for informer, delator) meant “monster” (as if that was any less harsh).

“I wrote to the broadcaster, retracting my word ‘traitor,’” Dershowitz told the Forward. “But if you’re asking me deep in my heart and soul do I believe that the word fairly characterizes him, in light of the way he’s used his Jewishness, both as a shield and a sword? You know, if the shoe fits.”

In the end, it all became too much for the South African judge. He’s tried to retract parts of the report he co-authored, along with publicly defending Israel against ‘the Apartheid Slander’. And if the truth be told it seems that has never disengaged himself from Zionism. However, the damage has already been done and the greater part of the Jewish community simply has no trust in him anymore.

I came to think of Goldstone’s destiny as I was reading Beyond Tribal Loyalties: Personal Stories of Jewish Peace Activists. The book is an anthology with contributions from 25 Jewish activists living in different parts of the world who have come to see the conflict from the Palestinian point of view. For most Jews, criticising Israel comes at a price – relatives and Jewish friends regard it as treason, they are accused of being self-hating, and in some cases even of paving the way for another Holocaust. But these stories are not mainly about the price they have to pay for their activism; it’s about their personal journeys that led them from being (in many cases) completely uncritical supporters of Israel and Zionism into defenders of Palestinian rights.

The book is edited by Avigail Abarbanel, a psychotherapist residing in the United Kingdom. Born in Israel in 1964, Abarbanel grew up in an abusive family and was—just like most other Israelis—completely blind to Palestinians and their suffering. Instead, Jewish suffering was the ubiquitous issue. During her school years the fear of another Holocaust was “repeatedly raised and debated” and she “was taught that everyone in the world, including Arabs, hated us just because we were Jews.” Even though Palestinians make up a fifth of Israel’s population she never understood who they were. She recalls:

I resented the Arab countries around us and our “enemy from within”—or the “fifth column” as the Palestinian citizens of Israel were sometimes called—that I thought wanted to “throw us into the sea”. I resented the world that didn’t seem to understand us and was against us all the time, for what I thought was no reason except our Jewishness. I didn’t understand why “they” couldn’t just leave us in peace. I thought the reason for our suffering, anxiety and insecurity was out there. Together with everyone else I felt hard done by, hassled and unsafe.

Abarbanel later left Israel for Australia, where she earned a degree in psychotherapy. As a student she was forced to scrutinise her past. This, along with reading The Iron Wall by Avi Shlaim, led her to renounce her Israeli citizenship and eventually reject Zionism altogether.

Ronit Yarosky was also unaware of who the Palestinians were. Her family left Montreal for Israel when she was 14 years old. She did her military service and was stationed in the West Bank. The Palestinian residents served as background actor – they were there, yet unimportant. West Bank cities and towns she stayed in as a soldier “were nameless to me because they were “only” Arab towns, and therefore of no significance in my life,” she remembers. Yarosky’s conversion began as she was working on her MA thesis back in Canada. It wasn’t until she read Benny Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem that she realised that Jewish settlements were established on the ruins of Arab villages, and that her uncle was even living in a Palestinian house. When she brought this up with her mother, the latter replied: “Well, obviously.” But to Ronit the newly discovered facts was life-changing, and after she could no longer turn a blind eye to what is happening to the Palestinians.

For others like Peter Slezak, Zionism as such doesn’t appear to have been important in his childhood. As a Jew in Australia he felt as an outsider already in primary school. And with most of his relatives being Holocaust survivors, the Haggadah’s warning that “in every generation they [i.e. non-Jews] rise against us to destroy us….” can easily feel validated. Slezak, like many other Jews, used to worry that all non-Jews inevitably harbored anti-Semitic feelings, a worry that took many years to finally overcome. Instead of regarding the Holocaust as a crime against Jews and a proof of why a Jewish state is needed, he sees a universalistic message in Never again. Some Jewish friends have even cut all ties with Selzak, and he has in his own words ended up “becoming a pariah in my own community” because of his pro-Palestinian activism.

This culture of intolerance is well captured by American musician Rich Siegel when he describes himself as “a cult survivor.” There is something “very seriously wrong with Israel, and with the culture that supports it,” he writes. Siegel should know. He was an ardent Zionist as a teenager, even to the degree that he was out in the streets protesting Arafat’s appearance at the UN in 1974, this while singing along to lyrics such as “We’ll kill those Syrians.” For Siegel, the image of an innocent Israel threatened by Jew-hating Arabs first started to crack while waiting for his wife outside a train station in Rhode Island in 2004. A few activists had a book stand outside the train station and he perused Phyllis Bennis’s Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer. He was left shocked after reading about Jews massacring Arabs at Deir Yassin, something he had never heard of. He kept on reading books about the conflict and came to understood what Zionism represented. Some of his friends and relatives are no longer part of his life, but he has no regrets.

I have here only presented glimpses from some of the 25 contributions, but they all deserve to be read in full. As a non-Jew it is difficult too fully relate to the sacredness of the Jewish state. However, all people and cultures have their taboos that cannot be disrespected without running the risk of being questioned, persecuted or excommunicated. On a personal level, we all have inner demons holding us back until we have the courage to face them.

Hardly surprising, fear is a reoccurring theme in the stories. Zionism thrives on fears – fear of the Arabs who want to kill the Jews just because of who they are; fear of the non-Jewish world that doesn’t understand Jews because there’s an anti-Semite living in every Gentile. It is only by challenging and facing their fears that Jews can detach themselves from Zionism.

In the afterword Abarbanel writes that she struggled with finding a common denominator for all 25 contributors. But eventually she did find one thing they all share, which she terms “emotional resilience.” She defines it as “the ability to tolerate uncomfortable feelings without avoiding them or trying to make them go away,” and adds that it includes “the ability to tolerate the experience of being disapproved of, disliked and rejected by others, sometimes even by relatives and close friends.” In plain English: to have the courage to stand up for what you believe in no matter the cost.

This is what makes the book so inspiring. 25 stories written by people who struggle because they feel what they are not supposed to feel, because they do things they are not supposed to do. They have the emotional resilience and sense of justice that Richard Goldstone lacks.

Given that the governments of Greece and Italy are apparently being seized for direct political rule by the financial system, one might suggest that dispensing with democratic niceties is the international order of the day. Perhaps, then, Israel won’t find itself all that isolated after all. But it might. In any case, developments in Israel and the commentary that they have triggered should provide the opportunity to forcefully brush aside any lingering illusions about Israeli establishment ‘moderation’. Such illusions are little more than an unfortunate hangover from years gone by, when Israeli colonial rule found unlikely allies even among ostensible Western progressives.

The authoritarian challenge to Ariel Sharon’s democracy

The English-language webpage of Ha’aretz, Israel’s daily ‘newspaper of record’, offers an interesting view of the sinking ship that is liberal Israeli hypocrisy. The site currently features a section titled ‘Project Black Flag’, borrowing the imagery from the Israeli legislature’s Kadima opposition, whose representatives demonstratively waved black flags in the Knesset earlier this month in protest against the current wave of authoritarian legislation being pushed through by Israel’s governing coalition. (Kadima, recall, is the party launched in 2005 by Ariel Sharon and continuing to champion his legacy.) Below, I’ll turn to some of the noteworthy associated commentary. First, its ideological and strategic context deserves some sustained attention.

Historically, the ample Western arms, economic backing and political-diplomatic cover that have enabled Israeli actions were given to an Israel that was widely understood to ‘shoot and cry’. Wars were forced upon it by nefarious enemies, and whatever abuses occurred during Israel’s valiant self-defence were committed with a pained restraint. ‘We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children,’ Golda Meir is quoted, ad nauseam, as explaining to the world. ‘We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.’ Incidentally, that ‘the Arabs’ (or the IHH, or whatever other designated enemies of Israel) are to blame even for Israeli atrocities remains a familiar theme of Israeli diplomacy – and maddeningly, variations on this theme are often echoed by many people who really ought to know better. Israel, anyway, internally distraught at what it was being forced to do, featured in this story as a brave but enlightened character beset by difficult dilemmas, both strategic and moral.

An exaggerated and idealized projection of the pluralism internal to the Jewish Israeli political system has been internationally exploited to destructive effect for many decades. This has been widely observed by critical observers of the US and Israeli political scenes. In his 1983 tome concerning US policy and the Palestine question, Noam Chomsky, for example, expressed his usual understated disgust at this spectacle. In the aftermath of the horrendous massacres in 1982 Lebanon, Chomsky observed, US Congressional liberals leveraged signs of dissent within Israel (which were largely driven by the tactical opposition of the Israeli Labour Party) to justify further increases in US aid to finance Israeli military power and settlement construction.

Israel, so the logic went, was proving itself to be a vibrant democracy. Chomsky wrote: ‘Presumably there is … a lesson here as to how to obtain further victories in Congress. It would be interesting to know how the reported 400,000 people who demonstrated in Israel in protest over the massacres will react to the fact – and fact it is – that the practical outcome of these efforts, given the way things are in the United States, was to accelerate the militarization of Israeli society and its expansion into the occupied territories.’¹ Unfortunately, judging from recent Israeli ‘moderate’ commentary, there is reason to suspect some may have been quite satisfied.

Idealized exaggeration of Israeli pluralism has long been very widespread indeed, even in critical circles. For example: ‘One often hears statements,’ as the late Tanya Reinhart observed, interpreting the detailed accounts of state policy available in Israel’s press ‘as signifying that the Israeli media is more liberal and critical of Israel’s policies than other Western media. This, however, is not the explanation.’ More to the point, she explained, it has less reason to be inhibited: ‘Things that would look outrageous in the Western world are in Israel considered natural daily routine.’² Nonetheless, so suffocating are the terms of discussion of Palestine in the West that critics are sometimes tempted to latch on to even the most morally bankrupt tactical dissent within the Israeli establishment to legitimize their own opposition.

This reflex serves to build up unrealistic expectations concerning prospective challenges to Israeli colonial rule from within the Jewish Israeli political system, to derail serious analysis and principled strategy, and sometimes to downplay the need for international action. Worst of all, it can take the form of ‘moderate’ opinion in the West demanding that Palestinians simply try to partner with ‘moderate’ Israeli establishment opinion – in other words, demanding Palestinian acquiescence to colonial rule (in thinning ‘peace process’ packaging) in a spirit of false internationalism. Palestinian resistance politics can then be dismissed if they fail to orient themselves towards dialogue with the increasingly elusive force that is the Israeli ‘peace camp’.

For at least some leading Israeli intellectuals, the strategic value of such distortion is apparent. An Israel that appears to ‘shoot and cry’ is understood to be better positioned to keep receiving the arms, economic backing and diplomatic cover necessary to keep firing than one that shoots and cheers. Hence the current dilemma.

Ilan Pappé, identified from the late 1980s as one of the Israeli ‘new historians’ who challenged established Zionist orthodoxy, recounts an instructive exchange he had in the ’90s with a colleague at Haifa University, Arnon Sofer – a rather iconic ‘organic intellectual’ for the forces of racist Israeli demographic management. Pappé cites Sofer as explaining: ‘Between you and me, within four closed walls, you are one of us. But it is good that you are beautifying Israel’s image abroad.’³ In Pappé’s case, such exchanges were predictably and definitively cut off by his political record in the ensuing years. They nonetheless reveal much about the outlook of advocates (à la Sofer) of an internationally palatable Israeli colonialism.

The visible rightward shift of Israeli politics is causing considerable unease in such quarters (as expressed in the recent commentary of Ari Shavit, sampled below).

A fight that liberals can’t easily win

The political dynamics that have set Israel on its current political trajectory deserve serious consideration. Indeed, within the Jewish Israeli political arena, on purely logical grounds, one can understand why the contest between unapologetic ethno-religious chauvinism and liberal Zionist hypocrisy is gradually being resolved at the expense of democratic pretense.

People interested in this contest (and prepared to plug their noses while facing an icon from each side) ought to watch the 1985 debate, available online, between Harvard University’s Alan Dershowitz and Rabbi Meir Kahane. For those without the nose plugs or stomach for the video, I’ll review a few relevant highlights.

Dershowitz (now here’s a real shock) offers little of original interest. Kahane, on the other hand, represents an interesting phenomenon. Since this debate finds Kahane in what for him constitutes good form, and at what for him most closely approximates good behaviour, I feel compelled to emphasize that this is a man who really does personify caustic, fascist venom (videos where he quite transparently expresses a visceral, hateful glee at the mass killing of Palestinians are also widely available). An open advocate of theocracy, violent expulsions and indiscriminate killing of civilians, Kahane explicitly urged his adherents to carry out paramilitary attacks against Palestinians along these lines, and many did and do (for his part, Kahane was assassinated in late 1990).

What is interesting about Kahane for present purposes is the way, rare if not unique, in which he presents the unapologetic Zionist case against liberal hypocrisy to an English-speaking audience. Notably, one can see – not in Kahane’s career or organizational work, which I won’t dwell on here, but in the logical course of the argument – the way in which he uses the consensual political Zionist demand for a Jewish majority state in the former Palestine to undercut the principled political basis for any genuine democratic opposition. While I do not wish to simply conflate the two, it is precisely the congruence of Kahane’s politics with Israel’s established political mainstream that makes the former at once dangerous and revealing.

I’ll confine this brief review of Kahane’s comments to two issues: (1) the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians and (2) the contradiction between democracy and the consensual political Zionist commitment to racist demographic management.

(1) Asked about instances in the preceding period in which his adherents indiscriminately killed Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, Kahane positions these actions within (albeit towards the right of) the established Zionist canon. He explains: ‘Innocent people? This is a picture of a man named David Raziel [Kahane shows a portrait of Raziel]. He’s a national hero in Israel. There is a village named after him, Ramat Raziel. Streets in Jerusalem, in Haifa, in Netanya, named after Raziel. Do you know who this hero was? There’s a stamp – a stamp! – in Israel with his picture on it. You know who David Raziel was? He was the head of the Irgun in the 1930s … David Raziel, the national hero of Israel, planted a bomb in the Arab marketplace in Jerusalem. It went off and it killed 27 Arabs.’ Those who continue in this tradition, Kahane later urges, should be fully supported by state forces: ‘it’s a tragedy that those Jews took the law into their own hands. It was the job of the government of Israel to do what they did. … those so-called “terrorists” were attempting to put the fear of God into the Arabs. Because the only thing that the Arab will ever understand is fear.’ (Consider: to what extent does this sentiment fundamentally differ from official ‘deterrence’ thinking?)

(2) More revealing, in many ways, are the exchanges between Kahane and Dershowitz on Arnon Sofer’s intellectual stomping ground: state management of the demographic balance in territory governed by Israel. This is among the central defining axes of Israeli politics, and its treatment during the debate is extremely illustrative.

In short, Dershowitz’s rhetorical flailing and Kahane’s forthright rebuttal stand together as a telling display of the pummeling that ostensible liberalism is likely to face in honest, principled debates that assume shared political Zionist premises (especially on the question of ‘demography’).

The debate moderator poses (1:00:49-) a basic question: Do ‘the Arabs’ have the right ‘to become the majority in Israel’ and ‘by democratic and peaceful means’ to challenge the state’s Jewish character?

Loathe to really admit Palestinians into such important ‘in-house’ debates, Dershowitz responds by immediately reframing the matter. Dershowitz begins: ‘We don’t even have to reach that issue: what if Jews decide by democratic principles to vote against principles that Rabbi Kahane holds sacred? What if Jews tomorrow were to vote to repeal the Law of Return [which guarantees any Jew defined as such by the state to gain immediate citizenship and residency rights]? I would fight tooth and nail against that … But Israel is a democracy. And if Rabbi Kahane and I, together, fail in our efforts to persuade Jews to maintain the Law of Return then we will have lost our fight for democracy. … We have to fight that [demographic] battle, we have to look at it as a challenge.’ In facing this challenge, Dershowitz suggests that it is actually Kahane who undermines the Judaization of Palestine by advocating a Halachic (Jewish theocratic) regime which will dissuade Jewish immigration and settlement from abroad. Thus, Dershowitz asserts, a liberal democratic Zionism provides the sturdier defense against the threat posed by indigenous Palestinian demography (i.e., resident existence).

Kahane replies: ‘I must say that was impressive. Dr Dershowitz took four minutes brilliantly not answering the question. The question wasn’t whether it was a challenge. Of course, it’s a challenge; agreed, it’s a challenge. The question was: Assuming the Arabs “beat” us, would you be willing to accept that? The question is, Do they have a right to be a majority, in theory? Under democracy, of course they have that right! Under Zionism – not religious Zionism, but the Zionism of a man named Herzl, who wrote a book called The Jewish State – of course they don’t have that right.’

Underpinning Kahane’s polemical strength are the basic points of contact between his caustic calls for anti-Palestinian action and the policies of Israel’s founding Labour Zionist mainstream. ‘We have,’ Kahane declares to the audience, ‘to face up to truth. We have to face up to so many truths. Among which is that Ben-Gurion, when he was the prime minister, didn’t allow an Arab to leave his village at night without a special pass [recall that Palestinian citizens of Israel faced military governance from 1948 through to 1966]. Which I think is a magnificent example of democracy.’

Likewise, albeit in a somewhat roundabout way, Kahane reminds the audience that debates about demography, ‘population transfer’ and exclusion of Palestinian refugees were not simply triggered by post-1967 Israeli policy in the West Bank and Gaza or the associated fundamentalist settler camp. ‘There’s not one Arab refugee living in Lebanon who comes from the West Bank,’ he emphasizes. ‘Every single one comes from the Galilee, from Haifa. There’s not one Arab refugee in Gaza who comes from the West Bank. Half of them come from Jaffa, and from Ramle, and from Lydda, and from Be’er Sheva, and from what is now Ashdod and Ashkelon [all locations from which Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948].’ Kahane’s point, for all the nominally defensive rhetoric with which he packages these remarks, is that if Israel accepts liberal democratic premises ‘there will be a Law of Return for Arabs – and rightly so, under democracy.’ Therefore, pursuit of consensual political Zionist aims is taken to require a rejection of democratic norms.⁴

The relative coherence of Kahane’s politics in this debate when compared to the rearguard tactical arguments made by Dershowitz is, in strategic terms, more apparent than real. Kahane’s doctrinal rigidity (especially combined with articulate Brooklyn English) involved an assault on the enlightened liberal pretenses that have greased Israel’s arms procurement machinery in the West since the state’s inception. In an earlier era, Ben-Gurion famously derided the politics of the Zionist right – specifically, those of Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky and his Revisionists – as ‘verbal maximalism’. To speak publicly of aggressive objectives at the expense of building the international support needed to realize them was, for Ben-Gurion, a novice move and a marker of political naivety.

Nowadays, concern for the possible ideological discomfort of Western patrons is apparently weakening as a constraint on the terms of Jewish Israeli political discussion, and the genuine sway of liberalism is eroding even more visibly.

‘Kahane is smiling’

Gideon Levy is one of those rare Israeli journalists who has staked out a position of genuine democratic opposition to state policies. Among his many periodic pieces with a standard unifying theme – ‘damn, mainstream Jewish Israeli politics are a disaster that just keeps getting worse’ (I paraphrase) – was an article published during Israel’s most recent elections and titled simply, ‘Kahane won’. A recent Ha’aretz news report (November 16) picks up on the same theme.

Describing this month’s Jerusalem rally marking the anniversary of Kahane’s assassination, where ‘euphoria gripp[ed] the massive crowd’, the reporter samples some of the video entertainment charging the ‘jubilant’ atmosphere:

Clip after clip that had aired on Israel’s commercial television stations over the last year was shown on the big screen of the Heichal David hall in Jerusalem’s Romema neighborhood. There was a report broadcast by Channel 10 just two days ago about Ariel Zilber’s new song, “Kahane was right.” A Channel 2 report that praised longtime [Kahanist] activist Itamar Ben-Gvir as a “skilled media machine and as “a kind of celeb” … Then back to Channel 2, which showed [National Union MK Michael] Ben-Ari explaining how he would respond to rocket fire from the Gaza Strip: “24 hours, and there would be no more Beit Hanun [a city in northern Gaza which has been especially hard hit by indiscriminate Israeli artillery fire].” The crowd went wild. “Today, Rabbi Kahane is sitting in heaven and smiling,” Ben-Gvir told the audience. … “Today, it isn’t just Ben-Ari,” Ben-Gvir noted. “In Yisrael Beitenu, in National Union, even in Likud they understand that Kahane was right.”

In earlier decades, the idealized international image of internal Israeli politics helped to colour perceptions of such displays. Consider the best known massacre of Palestinians by a follower of Kahane’s teachings: Israel Defense Forces (IDF) physician Baruch Goldstein’s February 1994 shooting spree in Hebron’s Ibrahimi mosque, which killed 29 Palestinians and wounded another 150. An important poll, relayed by an Israeli commentator in the immediate aftermath of the killings, ‘established that at least 50 per cent of Israeli Jews would approve of the massacre, provided that it was not referred to as a massacre but rather as a “Patriarch’s Cave Operation,” a nice-sounding term already being used by religious settlers.’ The commentator noted that this exposed as false mythology the notion that ‘with the exception of a few psychopaths, the entire nation, and its politicians included, has resolutely condemned Dr Goldstein, even though, luckily for us, all major television networks in the world were last week deluded by this untruth.’⁵ But crucially, the myth for the most part held.

Following the 1994 massacre, the Yitzhak Rabin government sealed the occupied West Bank and Gaza, repressed the ensuing wave of Palestinian protests (killing 33 Palestinians in the process), and put the Palestinian population of Hebron under a nearly six-week curfew to protect the settlement of Kiryat Arba (the messianic scourge which terrorizes Hebron, and in which Goldstein had resided); Rabin then moved on to join in accepting the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize.⁶ This is a balancing and juggling act for which the Israel of Binyamin Netanyahu is less well suited.
Today, the main organizations of the Jewish Israeli establishment ‘left’ are not only weak on principle (recall Labour Party leadership of the Defense Ministry that managed the assault on Gaza in 2008-9, and Meretz Party support for the Israel Air Force massacres that opened the campaign), but are also in disintegrating electoral freefall and facing a striking loss of their public influence. The implications of the possible collapse of the liberal Israeli establishment’s domestic political sway are too numerous to even try to list here. (Those interested in details can peruse Haaretz’s so-called ‘Project Black Flag’.) Here I’ll wrap up by sampling some strategic concerns expressed by veteran commentator and Ha’aretz editorial board member Ari Shavit.

Shavit, in his way, is attuned to global power relations and Israel’s place within them. Early this year, as Egyptian popular rebellion challenged the Hosni Mubarak dictatorship, Shavit mused: ‘Following half a century during which the Arab world has been governed by dictators, the rule of tyranny is cracking at the seams. The Arab masses are no longer willing to suffer.’ That the Obama administration did not rigidly support Mubarak’s rule in the face of this crisis was, for Shavit, a ‘betrayal’. ‘It could be that the American empire was evil’ in its reign over the past several decades, Shavit explained, but it has been beneficial for many and relied on a base of Third World ‘fear’ and ‘obedience’ that the US leadership is not doing a good enough job of maintaining.

Only time will tell whether the Obama administration’s attempt to maintain basic strategic military and political-economic continuity in Egypt without Mubarak’s personal participation will succeed in the face of the impressive popular resilience and courage on display in Egypt’s streets and factories, but one needs to be a truly callous hack to consider these developments from the vantage point of imperial strategy. Just to give a sense of where Shavit’s coming from.

This month, with the Israeli far right on a triumphant and internationally visible march through the Israeli mainstream, Shavit decries the fact that ‘Israel’s enlightened elite’ seems to have ‘lost its public hegemony’. While the forces of populist chauvinism may revel in this turn of events, Shavit pleas, their international implications cannot be ignored. ‘Israel’s alliance with the United States and Europe is based on shared values, and harming these values will erode the alliance.’

Shavit continues: ‘…without the elite of Rehavia, Ramat Aviv and Ra’anana, Israel would have no existence. Without left-wing scientists, left-wing intellectuals and left-wing high-tech entrepreneurs, Israel would be a backward country, weak and pathetic. It would not be able to rule over Judea and Samaria [the biblical designation for the West Bank], it would not be able to defend itself [!] against Iran, and it would not survive in the storms of the Middle East.’

Standing on such fine and noble principle, it’s no wonder that politics the likes of Shavit’s are facing a possible domestic collapse.

Conclusion

Internationally, we also need to face up to some obvious truths. One of which is that the problem is not merely the Meir Kahanes and Avigdor Liebermans. There exists a grim and ominous continuity running from the explicit articulation by legal representatives of Israel’s Kadima-Labour coalition of ‘economic warfare’ against the people of Gaza at the outset of 2008; through to the spoiling of 50,000 infant vaccines in April of that year, as even the general storage unit of Gaza’s Health Ministry was starved of fuel; and on to the deployment against Gaza at year’s end of soldiers among whom t-shirts soon circulated featuring a veiled, pregnant woman, her belly targeted in the crosshairs of a rifle, alongside the slogan ‘one shot, two kills’.⁷

That ongoing shifts in Jewish Israeli politics are increasing the clout of unabashedly genocidal political forces is very dangerous. The upsurge of democratic resistance to the regional order that has developed since the ‘Arab spring’ is, for its part, being variously interpreted in Israel (to take another pair of Ha’aretz articles from the past week as examples) as a deterrent to aggressive Israeli action and a possible trigger for it. But however these dynamics play themselves out, the burden of containing the Israeli threat cannot be forced solely upon those targeted by Israeli nuclear warheads. For Israeli planners, the prospect of an erosion of Israel’s base of support in the West continues to function as a deterrent to escalating crimes – albeit, for now, a fairly weak and unreliable one. For those of us in the West, ongoing efforts to attach tangible social costs to the current course of Israeli policy are thus the priority.

The movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions has done much to expand and enrich efforts in this direction. I’ll not contribute much of substance here to the necessary accompanying strategic discussions, but will briefly point out a couple of political traps that should be avoided.

The first, in light of the above, is an exaggeration of the pluralism of the Jewish Israeli political scene or excessive reliance on the dissidents within it. In earlier decades, critics in the West often suggested that identification with Jewish Israeli peace forces was an advisable means of engaging with the Palestine question (a politics that partially overlapped with the prominent public role of high-ranking dovish veterans of the Israeli military establishment in countering right-wing opposition to the ‘peace process’, especially in the US). There are of course genuine democratic movements doing important work under difficult circumstances in the Jewish Israeli political arena, mostly outside of the established ‘peace camp’. But those oriented towards the deteriorating terms of Jewish Israeli political discussion are, in the main, not positioned to constructively set the tone for critical international debate.

The second possible trap is an unhealthy fixation on Jewish dissent in the West. This is an awkward issue which I will only touch on briefly here. But the flip side of ongoing attacks on Palestinian citizens of Israel as fundamentally external to the Israeli polity is the state’s orientation towards those, abroad as well as resident, whom it defines as Jewish. Whether or not the current proposed legislation codifying ‘Israel’s status as the nation-state of the Jewish people’ passes, this is part of the Israeli political system’s basic orientation. Some quick points: It is necessary to develop a political climate of organized opposition that challenges both established Israeli state structures and the international organizations attached to them (e.g., the Jewish Federations of North America). Such opposition needs to be guided by an understanding that these formations do not truly represent the constituencies in whose name they claim to act (i.e., Jews everywhere; in this regard the overlap between predominant Zionist and anti-Semitic doctrine is striking). However, while specifically ‘Jewish’ oppositional politics will be a necessary part of this process, they are best positioned as a very narrow part of the broader challenge that is required.

On principle, a careful approach here is necessary. If we reject, as we ought to, the idea that Jewish identity (as defined by whatever clerics) should bestow upon an individual social and political rights in Palestine/Israel that trump those of the country’s indigenous people, then we ought also to challenge the legitimacy of any political weight that accrues to an individual’s political positions by virtue of this definition. And anyway, for good reasons, this particular kind of identity-based oppositional politics suffers from some basic strategic weaknesses that will inevitably limit its strength. Fixation on Jewish dissident politics can thus simultaneously skew dynamics within our movements, limit the scope and integrity of oppositional work on the Palestine question, and reproduce a new dead end in the tradition of automatic deference to the Israeli ‘peace camp’. Discussion of how to avoid this trap needs to be pursued seriously, but elaboration of the issue is for another place.

The fundamental point is this. The ‘almost total silence about Zionism’s doctrines for and treatment of the native Palestinians’ in ostensibly enlightened Western circles was, as Edward Said put it, ‘one of the most frightening cultural episodes’ of the 20th century.⁸ Broad and coordinated effort will be required to overcome its effects. In the face of the ongoing surge of unapologetic chauvinism within Jewish Israeli politics, no illusions about Israel’s internal political scene should linger or be allowed to calm international concerns. Given the established character of the Israeli leadership, the character of the domestic pressure it faces, and the balance of power between Israeli state forces and the Palestinians, intense concern is called for. At the very least, this moment should prompt some left ‘house-keeping’ through which allied hesitation in challenging the Israeli political system, as a system, is cleared away.

There are hopeful signs that the growing movements against austerity and for an expansion of social and democratic rights are incorporating critical engagement with the Palestine question within their development. No advocate for equality can support an Israeli state drifting towards theocracy and employing battlefield techniques against civilian populations in ‘defense’ of an anachronistic colonialism. The international political space opened by the crumbling of liberal Israeli mythology should be filled with unflinching popular demands for equality, in Palestine as elsewhere.

1. Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (Boston: South End Press, 1983 & 1999), p. 110.
2. Tanya Reinhart, The Road Map to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine Since 2003 (London: Verso Books, 2006), p. 9-10.
3. Ilan Pappé, Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel (London: Pluto Press, 2010), p. 30.
4. For context and details on the politics of ‘transfer’, in particular, see Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1928 (Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992) and A Land Without a People: Israel, Transfer and the Palestinians, 1949-96 (London: Faber & Faber, 1997); and Jonathan Cook, Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (London: Pluto Press, 2006).
5. For further citations and details see Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (London: Pluto Press, 1999), p. 99-108.
6. Graham Usher, Palestine in Crisis: The Struggle for Political Independence after Oslo (London: Pluto Press in association with the Transnational Institute and the Middle East Research & Information Project, 1995), p. 20.
7. Michele K. Esposito, ‘Quarterly Update on Conflict and Diplomacy, 16 February-15 May 2008’, Journal of Palestine Studies (vol. 47, no. 4), p. 124.
8. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1979 & 1992), p. 113.

On November 14th, two water wells were demolished in Baqa’a, east of Tammun, robbing hundreds of families of the ability to irrigate their land. On October 13, farmers received demolition orders on several water wells in Kufr al-Deek, a village in the town of Salfit near Nablus. In September, Israeli military forces demolished 6 water wells belonging to Palestinian Bedouin communities in the Jordan Valley, and have threatened to demolish six more. In all these cases, the unilateral IOF actions are explicitly illegal because these wells were built with full permission from the Palestinian Authority, in areas of the Valley supposedly under exclusive Palestinian civil and military control.

The injustice is especially pronounced in the Jordan Valley. On the 8th of September, 50 military jeeps, trucks and bulldozers sealed off Al Nasarayah as a closed military zone, and proceeded to illegally destroy 3 water wells and confiscate the attached water systems, the pumps of which cost $40,000 each to install. Five days later, the IOF returned to Al Nasarayah to demolish 2 more wells, stopping along the way to destroy another well east of Tamoun. The next day, IOF soldiers entered the village of Al- Fa’ara, near Nablus, to photograph and record the GPS coordinates of 6 more wells intended for demolition.

The IOF’s actions are illegal under Israeli, Palestinian and international law because these 6 water wells had permits from the Palestinian Authority, and operated in the 5% of the Jordan Valley designated after the 1994 Oslo Accords Area A, under full Palestinian civil and military control. The motives behind Israel’s actions on the ground, however, emerge into the light of day when seen in the context of other recent Israeli policy resolutions — a plan announced in September to uproot and transfer some 27,000 Bedouin out of Israel-controlled Area C in the West Bank (most Area C Bedouin live in the Jordan Valley), and a decision by the Settlement Division in early July to increase by 130% the land given to settlers for farming in the Jordan Valley, and to increase from 42 to 51 cubic meters per year the amount of water given to settlers to irrigate such farmland.

What do the destruction of Palestinian Bedouin water wells in the Jordan Valley, the transfer of Palestinian Bedouin citizens out of the Jordan Valley, and the expansion of land and water given to settlers in the Jordan Valley, all have in common? Together, they highlight the oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Jordan Valley that has typified Israeli policy since the Valley became occupied territory in 1967.

A focal point of this oppression — and a crucial locus of the Palestinian Bedouin struggle to resist the occupation and remain in their homeland — is the issue of water. For as Israel has seized absolute control over allocation and distribution of the resources of the 3 water aquifers under the West Bank for use on both sides of the Green Line, the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza, and especially the Bedouin population of the Jordan Valley, have seen the steady drying-up of the once-flowing springs around which they have built their villages, have found themselves unable to dig sufficient wells of their own because of crippling Israeli regulations, and have watched themselves become dependent on the exorbitant prices of their oppressor for access to so basic and indispensable a human right.

Far more than in the rest of the West Bank, the struggle over water for the Jordan Valley Bedouin is a struggle between life and death. The ‘draining away’ of Palestinian water rights in the Jordan Valley — to borrow the title of a 2010 report by Ma’an Development Center — has a long and tumultuous history. When the West Bank became occupied territory in 1967, the Israeli army established a military order to the effect that all West Bank water came under control of the state, and Israel’s national water carrier, Mekorot, seized water aquifers and developed wells throughout the West Bank to serve Israel and its newly expanding settlements. Between 1967 and the 1994 Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Bedouin in the Jordan Valley saw first their land, and then their water, disappear behind the heavily-guarded gates of settlements, where settlers were granted ample supplies of the latter in order to make the former bloom.

The situation grew increasingly dire until a brief ray of hope in 1995, when Article 40 of the Oslo II agreements set an interim agreement, designed to be revised within five years (but still in effect to this day), whereby approximately one quarter of West Bank water resources would come under Palestinian Authority control, and a Joint Water Committee would be established, in the words of the 2009 World Bank report ‘Assessment of Restrictions on Palestinian Water Development: West Bank and Gaza’, “to oversee management of the aquifers, with decisions to be based on consensus between the two parties.”

However, Oslo brought with it new institutionalized systems of oppression. Since Oslo 1 in 1993 consigned 95% of the Jordan Valley to Area C status (under full Israeli and military control), neither the Area C Bedouin communities themselves, nor the Palestinian Authority, nor the constant swarm of international NGOs, can commence with unregulated construction of their own initiative, because, in the words of Jordan Valley Solidarity, a grassroots movement, “across Area C, access to basic services such as water is restricted through the debilitating permit system which is regulated by the Israeli Civil Administration. Obtaining a permit for any form of construction –even for water- is notoriously difficult, nay impossible. This prevents Palestinians from building new infrastructure, or from making improvements to existing facilities.”

Atop this blanket layer of oppression, which effectively and intentionally squelches all trace of community autonomy, the Palestinian Bedouin in the 95% of the Jordan Valley which is Area C are deprived of the ability to improve their access to water resources through three interlocking buereacratic systems of control — the Joint Water Committee, where a group of Israeli and Palestinian decision-makers permits or denies water access or rehabilitation projects proposed by the Palestinian Water Authority (for Areas A, B and C); the Israeli Civil Administration, which, if an Area C project is permitted by the Joint Water Committee, pulls that project through a thicket of bureaucratic, technical limitations and scrutinies, effectively crippling its implementation if not grinding it to a halt completely; and, last but not least, the Israeli army, which ceaselessly continues, as it sees fit and irregardless of law, to demolish water wells, tankers, and infrastructure on the ground in Bedouin communities across Areas A, B and C, even if the proper permits are possessed.

Thus, what was promised under Oslo II to be consensus decision-making regarding water resources is in reality institutionalized unilateral control of the oppressor over the oppressed, and due to this matrix of Israeli control, it becomes nearly impossible for the Palestinian Authority, as well as most NGOs, to commit themselves to meaningful, sustainable infrastructural development in Area C of the West Bank.

At the level of the Joint Water Committee, details Ma’an’s ‘Draining Away’, “the fact that decisions are arrived at through consensus effectively means that Israel can veto Palestinian projects… [also], the PWA is not consulted regarding extractions from the aquifer for Israeli use (settlers or otherwise), which is not in accordance with the governance rules under Article 40. Nor does the Palestinian Authority have the right to access data on Israeli use of water resources, whereas Israel reserves the right for continual access to water resource data in the West Bank… around 150 water and sanitation projects are still pending JWC approval for “technical and security reasons”, while only one new Palestinian well project for the Western aquifer has been approved since 1993. In contrast, Israel is able to construct pipelines to its illegal settlements without going through the mechanism of the JWC. Thus Israel effectively has full control of water resources in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”

The World Bank’s 2009 report confirms the non-consensual reality of the Joint Water Committee’s supposed ‘consensus decision-making’ — “[the] JWC has not fulfilled its role of providing a supportive governance framework for joint resource management and investment… politics and policy issues have limited the number of project approvals…fundamental asymmetries — of power, of capacity, of information — put into question the role of JWC as a “joint” institution…Israel takes unilateral water-related actions outside the JWC… only one third (by value) of projects presented to the JWC 2001-8 have been implemented… (1) the process is in general slow; (2) the rate of rejection of PA projects is high; (3) the PWA has almost never sought to reject Israeli projects (only one has not been approved); and (4) well drilling projects and — until very recently -wastewater projects have had very low rates of approval… in order to solicit approvals on vital emergency water needs, the PA is forced into positions that compromise its basic policy principles. Such an asymmetrical power balance (one party, Israel, has virtually all the power and is not driven by emergencies), together with the observed track record of the JWC, have contributed to a loss of trust and confidence and to very poor outcomes (for Palestinians) that undermine the rationale for the committee as a de facto “joint” approach to water sector management.”

Deeb Abdelghafar, Director of Water Resources for the Palestinian Water Authority, relates how “we submitted our application two years ago to build two new production wells in the northern part of the Jordan Valley, [to supply] water for domestic and agricultural purposes, and we know that they have reviewed it, but up to now we have not gotten any response, and we are not optimistic… we have more than 80 agricultural wells that need to be rehabilitated in Jordan Valley, and we have had these wells in the JWC for more than 4 years, but unfortunately we could not get final approval from Joint Water Committee.”

Even if the Joint Water Committee approves a project, its effective implementation is crippled by the red tape of the Israeli Civil Administration. Abdelghafar continues: “the most difficult step in the process for us is the Civil Administration because there are more than 14 departments, and each department must approve on the project. So we can never get a project through the civil administration, because some departments approve and some do not.” Ayman Rabi, Assistant Director of the Palestinian Hydrology Group for Water and Environmental Resources Development, an NGO working to improve access to water and sanitation services in the Occupied Palestinian territories. echoes Abdelghafar’s frustrations that “there is a big problem now in implementing anything in Area C, and that is one of the major hindrances right now to our work in that area….we have to ask [for a] permit and this generally we do through Palestinian Authority, and then they are applying through the Joint Water Committee… [but] even if the Joint Water Committee approves any intervention or project, the Israeli Civil Administration requests more documentation procedures, the process is longer, they put more conditions for implementation in Area C, so you might end up not implementing any activity because of this long and complicated procedure.” The World Bank report quotes an anonymous donor who reports the same difficulties- “first thing we request is a letter from PWA approving the project. Then we go to the JWC. But then we have to go to the Civil Administration – and there delays of 2-3 years are normal. In fact, we have no positive outcomes for Area C.”

Since nearly every proposal for the construction of water infrastructure in Area C is shut down by the twin juggernauts of the Joint Water Committee and the Israeli Civil Administration, NGOs must focus their efforts, to quote Abdelghafar, on “civil emergency intervention — by delivering small water tankers, by supplying them with water tanks, by constructing rainwater cisterns — it’s emergency humanitarian relief.” While important, this small-scale aid is carried out in lieu of large-scale, long-term projects that would strike at the root of the problem, rather than merely seeking to alleviate its effects. Says the World Bank report, “in the light of the difficulty of implementing major projects, the reasonable response has been short term emergency projects, often small projects with NGOs, and these smaller projects have become a very large part of water sector development… however, the multiplicity of small donors and multiple projects are more difficult to fit within a planning framework… NGOs have a comparative advantage in a grass roots field presence and a certain demand-driven character…[they are] nimble… but are small scale and short term” (p.63).

In the village of Hamsa, near the Hamra checkpoint in the Jordan Valley, Abu Riyad, who has been living in Hamsa with his family for thirty years, must now travel long distances to get water for drinking and irrigation, after two huge water wells constructed for nearby settlements have dried up the springs upon which for generations the community of Hamsa has relied. Says Ma’an’s report ‘Draining Away’: “unconnected to the water network, Abu Riyad must now travel to Ein Shibleh for his water. Nor does the family know the quality of the water and if it has been treated. While he is fortunate not to have to pay for this supply, it costs 200 shekels to transport 10 cubic metres of water. As the water covers all of the family’s needs, from drinking, washing and drinking water for the animals, Abu Riyad must transport this amount every four days. With the price of fuel rising, this means that water represents an increasing financial drain for the family…the community receives little support. While several tanks and water coupons have been donated from local and international NGOs, this is only ever for limited amounts of time, and thus provides only temporary relief.”

Indeed, Abu Riyad is fortunate to receive water for free. Ayman Rabi of the Palestinian Hydrology Group laments that, regarding many of his organization’s aid initiatives, “[the recipients of water] are asked to contribute, unfortunately. Although we do not like this, it is something that has been agreed on by the [Palestinian] Water Authority. They have been asked to contribute by 10 shekels, though we are not happy with this arrangement, for each cubic meter. and then we refill them whenever they ask us to.”

Many organizations, instead of delivering water, deliver water tanks to imperiled communities, so that Bedouin may transport water from filling points. However, by delivering water tanks, instead of connecting communities to water networks, these NGOs, though well-intentioned, often compound the problem by forcing the Bedouin to drive long distances, through a myriad of checkpoints, to filling points in Areas A or B, in order to maintain a constant water supply. The World Bank report decries that “occupation checkpoints and curfews severely limit tanker access to communities… there are 36 fixed checkpoints across the West Bank, including the gates of the Separation Barrier, that seriously affect access of water tankers and maintenance teams to communities…. Given the risks faced by drivers for their physical safety coupled with the longer routes, the price of water through tankers has increased exponentially”.

The case of Abu Riyad illustrates how expensive this practice can become for Bedouin faced with no alternative. According to Fathy Khdirat of Jordan Valley Solidarity, “to use water tankers in this way costs the Bedouin 30 shekels per cubic meter of water, while their neighbors in Areas A or B pay on average between ½ and 3 shekels per cubic meter of water.” The perpetuation of this inequality works in the occupation’s favor, by encouraging Bedouin to move out of Area C into Areas A or B.

In addition, mobilizing short-term emergency relief is much more expensive for the NGOs than would be a project to install permanent pipelines linking the Bedouin to water sources. Fathy Khdirat estimates that a recent $700,000 initiative to accomplish the former could have achieved the latter with 10% of the budget. Between the Joint Water Committee, the Israeli Civil Administration and the IOF, however, the possibility of installing permanent water infrastructure for the Bedouin is practically foreclosed from the beginning, so that aid initiatives are forced to work within the restricting, oppressive parameters of Israeli law. Says the World Bank report, “at best, the PA role is reduced to improving water and sanitation services to Palestinian communities within the constraints laid down…stakeholders recognize the inefficiency and high costs of such fragmented and contingency development but see no alternative.”

The bueraucratic matrix of corruption and control, in which both Israeli and Palestinian political and civil organizations are enmeshed, causes on-the-ground human rights abuses in clear violation of The Right To Water, enshrined in General Comment no. 15 of articles 11 and 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights by the United Nations Economic and Social Council in Geneva, in November 2002. The document stipulates that “the right to water contains both freedoms and entitlements. The freedoms include the right to maintain access to existing water supplies necessary for the right to water, and the right to be free from interference… by contrast, the entitlements include the right to a system of water supply and management that provides equality of opportunity for people to enjoy the right to water.” The covenant goes on to list specific water entitlements — the right of “physical accessibility: water, and adequate water facilities and services, must be within safe physical reach for all sections of the population. Sufficient, safe and acceptable water must be accessible… within, or in the immediate vicinity, of each household, educational institution and workplace…”; the right of “economic accessibility: water, and water facilities and services, must be affordable for all. The direct and indirect costs and charges associated with securing water must be affordable…”; and the right of “non-discrimination: water and water facilities and services must be accessible to all, including the most vulnerable or marginalized sections of the population, in law and in fact, without discrimination”.

Ma’an’s report, ‘Draining Away’, clarifies that, in regards to the Right to Water enshrined in this document, that “while this right does not entitle people to unlimited use of free water or to household connection, it does mean that water and sanitation services should be affordable, that water and sanitation facilities should be in the immediate vicinity of the household, and that water should be used in a sustainable manner. This right exists irrespective of an individual’s ethnicity, gender, age, religious or political beliefs… it also stipulates that individuals and communities can participate in, and influence, decision making relating to water and sanitation services on national and local levels.”

Here are some quick facts taken from ‘Draining Away’, which should be measured against the UN-enshrined Right to Water-

In October 2009 Amnesty International noted that “180,000-200,000 Palestinians living in rural communities have no access to running water, and even in towns and villages which are connected to the water network, the taps often run dry.”

According to the WASH monitoring project, the cost of private tankered water in 290 communities in the West Bank has increased between 100-200% for one cubic meter since the start of the intifada.

40% of Palestinians in the Jordan Valley consume less water than the minimum global standard set by the World Health Organization, which is set at 100 liters cubed per day.

56,000 Palestinians in the Jordan Valley consume an average of 37 Million Cubic Meters (MCM) of water per year, as compared to an average of 41 MCM for only 9,400 settlers.

Palestinians are charged more than their counterparts in Israel for water: Mekorot charges Israelis NIS 1.8 per cubic metre, compared to an average of NIS 2.5 per cubic metre for Palestinians.

There is near-universal consensus that there exists in the Jordan Valley a systematic policy of oppression and ethnic cleansing, touching upon not only water but all aspects of life for the 15,000 Bedouin who are unconnected to any water network in the 95% of the Valley designated Area C. Says Deeb Abdelghafar of the Palestinian Water Authority, “the Jordan Valley is a unique area from the Israeli point of view. They are trying to [establish] control over this area, and they are trying to prevent any permanent water infrastructure in order to prevent the people to be there… they don’t want to support the existence of these people, they want to immigrate the people outside of this area.”

Advocates like Fathy Khdirat of Jordan Valley Solidarity, a grassroots movement that works to build infrastructure for the Bedouin of the Valley, are determined to encourage those under occupation to resist the oppression, and remain in their native land. “I spent all my life under the Occupation,” insists Fathy, “and I want to see a better future for my children. I am from there, and I will not shut up.”

Events still to unfold will determine the answer but in advance of them, and before Field Marshall Mohamed Hussein Tantawi demonstrated a degree of panic by announcing that the election of a civilian president would be brought forward, the assessment of many informed observers was in tune with that of Marina Ottaway, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She wrote: “In the early days of the Egyptian uprising, when violence threatened to engulf the country, the military did an admirable job of maintaining order without violence and easing Hosni Mubarak out of office. Ten months later, it has emerged as the most serious threat in the transition to democracy. Recent announcements leave no doubt that the military indeed rules Egypt and intends to maintain its control indefinitely.”

The best indicator of whether or not Eygpt’s generals will eventually bow to people power and let democracy have its way will be in their final decision about dropping or not their proposal that new constitutional principles should preserve special powers for the military after the handover to civilian rule. These special powers as originally proposed would give the military a veto over a new constitution and prevent scrutiny of its vast budget. In other words, these “supra-constitutional” principles would enshrine the military’s right to intervene in civilian politics at any time of its choosing.

If Egypt’s generals do seek to control the democratic process by (among other things) fixing elections as Mubarak did, they will back their actions with the assertion that they must do whatever is necessary to prevent radical Islam taking over the country. That would put them on the same page as Zionism’s propaganda maestros. In a recent article for Ha’aretz, Moshe Arens, a former Israeli Minister of Defence and Foreign Minister, wrote the following.

A wave of Islamic rule, with all it entails, is sweeping across the Arab world. It will replace secular dictatorships with Islamic ones. We should have expected nothing else… Observers may fool themselves into believing that the Islamic parties contesting the elections in the Arab countries are ‘mildly’ Islamic, or ‘moderate’ Islamists, but their leaders are neither mild nor moderate.

The unstated but implicit Zionist message Arens is conveying is that the Arab Spring will create more and more states that will become safe havens for Islamic terrorists, and that Israel and the West, America especially, will have to pursue the “war against terrorism” on many more fronts with even greater vigour and escalating expense.

What the overwhelming majority of all Arabs want is an end to corrupt, repressive, autocratic rule. In reality there is no prospect of Muslims who preach the need for violence and practise it calling the shots if democracy is allowed to take root and grow in the Arab world. In Egypt for example, and whatever it may or may not have been in the past, the Muslim Brotherhood is the process of transforming itself, now in the guise of the Freedom and Justice Party, into a modern and progressive political force which truly wants to see Egypt governed by democratic means for the benefit of all and not just a privileged elite. The only thing that could drive a significant number of Egyptians into supporting violent Islamic fundamentalism is never-ending military suppression of their demands for freedom and democracy. (If this were to happen one could say that like George “Dubya” Bush and Tony Blair, Egypt’s generals had become recruiting sergeants for violent Islamic fundamentalism).

In my analysis Arens’ prediction of what will happen in the Arab world is a cover for the real fear of Zionism’s in-Israel and in-America leaders. It is that democracy could or even will take root in the Arab world or at least major chunks of it. Why such a prospect alarms Zionism is not complicated.

Democratically elected Arab governments would have to be reflect the will of their masses, the voters. On the matter of the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel, what is the will of the Arab masses? In their heads if not always their hearts it is not for military confrontation with Israel. It is that their governments be united enough use the leverage they have on America, to cause it to use the leverage it has on Israel, to cause or try to cause enough Israeli Jews to face reality and insist that their leaders make peace on terms which would satisfy the demands and needs of the Palestinians for justice, while at the same time guaranteeing the security and wellbeing of Jews now resident in Palestine that became Israel.

The leverage the Arab world has is in the form of oil, money and diplomatic relations.

For an example of how this Arab leverage could have been used to good effect in the past I’ll turn the clock back to 1967. Now let us suppose that in the weeks following the Six Days War the Arab leaders put their act together and sent one of their number secretly to Washington to deliver this message to President Johnson: “If you don’t get the Israelis back to the pre-war borders, we’ll turn off the oil taps.” (That is how Zionism’s in-Israel leaders would have played the oil card if the boot had been on the other foot, if they had been in the Arab position).

How would Johnson (or any other occupant of the White House) have responded?

If he believed the Arab leaders were united and serious, not bluffing, he would have said something very like the following: “I can’t promise quick action on East Jerusalem but otherwise give me three weeks and I’ll do it.”

In short, the Arabs would not have had to turn off the oil taps. A credible threat to do so would have been enough to motivate Johnson (or any other American president) to use all necessary leverage to bring Israel’s occupation to a quick end.

That’s how the game of political leverage is played.

A real hello to democracy in the Arab world or at least significant chunks of it, and Egypt especially, would be very bad news for Zionism.

Netanyahu is fully aware of this and is escalating his anti Arab Spring rhetoric. In his latest speech to the Knesset he blasted Israeli and world politicians who support the demands for change in the Arab world and accused it of “moving not forward, but backward.” He asserted that his original forecast that the Arab Spring would turn into an “Islamic, anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli and anti-democratic wave” had turned out to be true.

In his report for Ha’aretz, Barak Ravid wrote: “The speech showed an expressed lack of trust in Arab nations’ ability to maintain a democratic regime; a yearning to go back to the days of ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak; a fear of the collapse of the Hashemite royal house in Jordan, and an utter lack of willingness to make any concessions to the Palestinians.”

Netanyahu also slammed those Western leaders, Obama especially, who had pressed Egypt’s generals to tell Mubarak to go. At the time that was happening, Ravid revealed, Netanyahu said in closed talks that the American administration and many European leaders “don’t understand reality”. In his last speech he called them “naive”.

I used to wonder if Netanyahu really believes the nonsense he talks. I am now convinced that he does.

The the latest development in Cairo, the apology by two of the generals on the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) are making me wonder if the coming days will see the removal of Field Marshall Tantawi, which is what the protestors in Tahrir Square are demanding. The two generals not only apologized for the deaths of protestors, they said, according to the BBC report I heard, “We do not aspire to power and we do not want to continue in power.”

If those words can be taken at face value, they suggest to me that a majority of Tantawi’s SCAF colleagues have realised that continuing in power, even behind the scenes, would require them at a point to give orders to the army to shoot to kill large numbers of Egyptians, orders which would not be obeyed by the lower ranks and foot soldiers.

If that is the case, Tantawi’s departure would indicate that it is the prospects for a real hello to democracy in Egypt are improving. And if something approaching real democracy [Mr. Hart's definition of "real democracy" -- Ed.] can take root and grow in Egypt, the days of Arab autocrats and despots almost everywhere (probably not Saudi Arabia) may well be numbered.